Fond of obscurity since 1991

quidfit:

Where FEMA fell short, Occupy Sandy was there

This article was great. Extremely well written and it definitely says something about the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

If you’re out to make a difference, this is how you do it.

Occupiers used their powers and their numbers to form an emergency relief group in New York for those affected by Hurricane Sandy.

(via oldenough2burmom)

thepeoplesrecord:

Alright occupiers, trick or treat,

Let’s all go to Washington, DC, and have a Halloween night party!

Let’s celebrate the wonderful Coke/Pepsi presidential election now in progress … and the honest, feisty way our elected reps in Congress have conducted our nation’s business … pay tribute to the bold visions they’ve put forward.

At dusk on October 31, let’s gather on Capitol Hill, trick or treat Congress and party like we’ve never partied before.

Bring mask!

CJ HQ

PS And if you cannot make it to DC then party in front of the Bank of America in your community… outside your city hall… or in the squares.

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET
#OCCUPYMAINSTREET
#HALLOWEENPARTY

Tactical Briefing #38, #37 and #36.

Invite your friends via the Facebook event: #HALLOWEENPARTY

Source

—

We’ll be there. Will we see you there too? 

thepeoplesrecord:

Fracktivists unite against Shale Gas Insight conference

September 21, 2012

Hundreds of self-proclaimed “fracktivists” rallied and marched through Center City on Thursday afternoon, protesting the Shale Gas Insight conference and urging governments at all levels to ban the natural-gas-drilling process known as fracking.

Opponents say the hydraulic fracturing process pollutes local aquifers, causes serious health problems, and will result in net job loss.

For more than two hours, speakers described what they called adverse effects of the process near their homes.

Tammy Manning of Susquehanna County said the gases around her well recently tested at 82 percent methane. She said she was told to leave the water running all the time because if the gas built up, it could cause her house to explode.

A spokesman for Energy in Depth, an industry-funded advocacy group, said that Manning lives in an area with historically high methane levels and that the problems on her property “are likely not attributed to Marcellus Shale development.”

Carol French, a dairy farmer who lives 11/2 miles from a natural-gas drilling site in Bradford County, Pa., said her water often comes out white and turns gelatinous after sitting out for a half-hour. While the drilling company was at work, French said, her daughter became extremely ill, with bloody stool and enlarged organs.

Ray Kemble of Dimock, Pa., the town featured in the Gasland documentary, held up a jug that he said held water from his well that was the color of apple juice. According to government tests, he said, it is contaminated with weapons-grade uranium, arsenic, and other carcinogens.

Natural-gas companies deny that such effects can be tied to their operations. Many cases are being litigated.

As the speakers stepped up to the microphone, Shale Gas Insight attendees watched from above in a bay window of the Convention Center. “I hope they’re scared,” one protester said.

At one point, the several hundred protesters looked up and raised middle fingers to their audience.

A recent focus of the anti-fracking campaign is worker safety. Critics say companies expose workers to dangerous chemicals and force them to operate under unsafe conditions. In May, the New York Times reported that natural-gas companies were pressuring truck drivers to work 20-hour shifts.

Charlotte Bevins said she and her mother rose at 4 a.m. to drive to Philadelphia from West Virginia. Bevins said her brother Charles was supervising a forklift for a natural-gas contractor, at $13 an hour, last year. He was killed when the forklift sank into the mud, pinning him between the forklift and a building.

“After talking to his coworkers, they tell me there’s no safe way to do this,” Bevins said. “They’re always using the cheapest, the quickest thing they can.”

Bevins said her brother, a 23-year-old father of two, was working 15-day stretches with five days off in between.

After the rally, the protesters marched to the PNC Building to chant anti-fracking slogans. The event culminated in a speech in front of Gov. Corbett’s Philadelphia office.

Thursday’s protest was orderly and resulted in no arrests, and attendees were provided with food, water, and restrooms.

The protest was organized under the name Shale Gas Outrage by a coalition of social and environmental groups, including Protecting Our Waters, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, Food and Water Watch, and anti-fracking groups from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and elsewhere.

Source

joshuaduane:

Occupy Wall Street
September 17, 2012

Today was rather interesting. Lots of people, lots of fuckery.

Things that need to happen to move this movement forward:

1) Every person with a god damn camera and film crew, trying to get “that shot,” need to die or remove themselves from our marches completely. A few people is sufficient to film the police. We can’t march anywhere when we are all tripping over each other because no one can stop staring into their phone/camera/device.

2) Occupy is an anit-capitalist movement and it needs to be explicitly a resistance movement (not a whining-fest/circle jerk). We need to stop skirting around these terms and stop being afraid to loudly proclaim what we genuinely are, and rightfully should be.

3) The “revolution” will not start until an actual crisis occurs (like the coming food crisis). Until most of this country can no longer afford the price of bread, the “masses” will never join us in the streets. Knowing this, our time needs to be spent building a culture of resistance that builds affinity, solidarity, and ultimately trust so that when we are in the streets, en masse, we can act efficiently and without fear.

(Source: mainstreamrevolution)

thepeoplesrecord:

As the one year anniversary of OWS approaches, where do we stand?

September 15, 2012

To put it in a nutshell: the Zuccotti encampment model might have passed its heyday, but the spirit of Occupy is still very much alive … evolving and inspiring, expanding our understanding of the possible, exploding our political imagination. Before S17 we relied on the same dinosaur paradigm of the dusty old left. We looked backward for inspiration instead of forward. With Occupy we jumped over that old dead goat. Now it’s time to leap fresh again.

Look at what’s happening in Quebec … the boldness of the media democracy movement in Mexico … the teenagers leading an education revolt in Chile … the Pussy Riot inspired art war unnerving Putin in Russia … and the new post-capitalist ways of living being forged in Greece and Spain. Witness the growing tempo of green riots across China, the South African miner strikes, the corruption protests of India, the freedom fight in Bahrain, the tremors of dissent in Saudi Arabia, the total loss of confidence in America’s corporate-funded Coke-Pepsi election show. Then, add to that the crippling droughts, looming food scarcity, the end of easy oil and the tipping points hovering ominously on the horizon …

Occupy began as a primal scream against the monied corruption of our democracy … but after a year of struggling against an unrepentant corporatocracy, our goals are now deeper, our dreams wilder. We see a common thread emerging — a blue-green-black hybrid politics — that unites and elevates our movement:

On the blue front, we eradicate the commercial virus infecting our culture – we liberate the flow of information, champion the leakers, protect anonymity, and break up the corporate media monopolies with outrageous creative hacks.

On the deep green front, we push towards a decisive victory in the forty-year environmentalist struggle – we institute a binding international accord on climate change, pursue a worldwide de-growth economic agenda funded by a Robin Hood Tax and establish an across the board true cost market regime in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth.

On the black front, we restore the dominion of people over corporations by all nonviolent means necessary – we unleash a visceral wave of jams, meme wars and cultural interventions against the monied elite, the financial fraudsters, paid-for politicians and megacorporate outposts in our cities. We kill off criminal corporations like Goldman Sachs, Exxon, Pfizer, Monsanto, Philip Morris and others that have broken the public trust.

A radical blue-green-black transformation of the current global system might sound hopefully idealistic, foolishly utopian, even radically impossible, but remember that on July 13 2011, when the first call for occupying the iconic center of global capitalism went out, it sounded all too naively absurd as well.

#PIRATEPARTYUSA
#PIRATEPARTYUK
#PIRATEPARTYCANADA
#PIRATEPARTYAUSTRALIA

If you are in America, vote strategically but keep your eyes on the horizon. Our civilization remains steadfast on its economic, ecological and psychological crash course and sometime over the next few months, maybe in the new year, a galvanizing global moment of truth will happen … be ready for it … prepare yourself … stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith, wake up every morning ready to live without dead time … Capitalism is heaving and our movement has just begun.

On September 17, meet at dawn ready to rumble on Wall Street:
http://s17nyc.org/schedule/s17/

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

Occupywallstreet.org

Via Adbusters

thepeoplesrecord:

We are now one year away from global riots, complex systems theorists say

September 15, 2012

What’s the number one reason we riot? Hunger — food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense, Motherboard reports.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this the above graph.

Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses. When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat — or worse, your family can’t eat — you fight.

Today, the food price index is hovering around 213, where it has stayed for months — just beyond the tip of the identified threshold. Low corn yield in the U.S., the world’s most important producer, has helped keep prices high.

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

Even before the extreme weather scrambled food prices this year, CSI’s 2011 report predicted that the next great breach would occur in August 2013, and that the risk of more worldwide rioting would follow.

But the reality is that such predictions are now all but impossible to make. In a world well-warmed by climate change, unpredictable, extreme weather events like the drought that has consumed 60% of the United States and the record heat that has killed its cattle are now the norm. Just two years ago, heat waves in Russia crippled its grain yield and dealt a devastating blow to global food markets — the true, unheralded father of the Arab Spring was global warming,some say.

And it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse. Because of climate change-exacerbated disasters like these, “the average price of staple foods such as maize could more than double in the next 20 years compared with 2010 trend prices,” a new report from Oxfam reveals. That report details how the poor will be even more vulnerable to climate change-induced food price shocks than previously thought. After all, we’ve “loaded the climate dice,” as NASA’s James Hansen likes to say, and the chances of such disasters rolling out are greater than ever.

Source

thepeoplesrecord:

Source

The needs of our society should be the driving force behind our decisions, not profits. This is why some people end up with billions while others remain in poverty while working hard their whole lives. Our system rewards those who already have; and it continues to get more and more unbalanced everyday. The last time we organized on a mass scale, we were able to put this in check with the New Deal. But things have become out of control once again and in response, we HAVE to organise, we HAVE to take to the street in protest and we CAN’T allow ourselves to become content with pressing an irrelevant button in a voting booth and pat ourselves on the back for doing something. We have to do more if we want to change anything. Stop worrying about which team will win the white house and start worrying about how you can force pressure and demands on WHOEVER it is. When organized, we have the power.

occupycha:

We wish this wasn’t a joke.

Only 3 more days until we protest Fannie and Freddie in Atlanta! We have six tickets left, contact us for details.

occupychaevents@gmail.com