Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

Spirits were high last night as occupiers were joined by 92-year-old folk legend Pete Seeger for a late night march to Columbus Circle, where a midnight performance featuring Seeger’s grandson Tao Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, composer David Amram, bluesman Guy Davis and others.

A live stream of the action offered millions an opportunity to view the transcendental nature of the moment that was unfolding. The march was one of the most inspiring yet because the repetitive chants were abandoned for folk songs Pete Seeger & others are known for singing. “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep” & “This Little Light of Mine” were all sung by people while marching to Columbus Circle.

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It was truly a spiritual experience and opportunity for younger generations to hear some of the best folk/protest music in the history of America. Songs like “This Land is Your Land” have become patriotic songs yet the song written by Woody Guthrie is actually a song for revolutionaries. That is why a sanitized version of the song is often sung. Pete Seeger actually sang the version with lost verses during a “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial that was part of Obama’s Inauguration.

This is one of the typically absent verses:

“As I went walking I saw a sign there

   And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

   But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,

   That side was made for you and me.”

Pete Seeger, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin and David Amram joined Occupy Wall Street on a march from Broadway and 95th Street in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, down to Columbus Circle at Broadway and 59th Street. When we got there, this is what happened.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman celebrates the Occupy Wall Street movement’s ability to refocus the country’s and Washington’s attention from deficits to jobs when economists like Krugman could not. “It turns out that no number of learned papers on how we’re doing this wrong, no number of sober editorials on how we’re doing this wrong was making a dent.”

I visited Zuccotti Park yesterday. Michael Moore gave a short speech, transmitted by the human microphone. I gather that right-wingers are claiming that OWS is anti-Semitic; someone forgot to tell the excellent Klezmer band.

Overall, what struck me was how non-threatening the thing is: a modest-sized, good-natured crowd, mostly young (it was a cold and windy evening) but with plenty of middle-aged people there, not all that scruffy. Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect to shake up the whole national debate. Yet it has – which can only mean one thing: the emperor was naked, and all it took was one honest voice to point it out.

As for how the emperor got that naked: read Ari Berman’s article on the austerity class, and its dominance in Washington.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – When “Occupy Wall Street” protesters took over two parks in Portland’s soggy downtown, they pitched 300 tents and offered free food, medical care and shelter to anyone. They weren’t just building, like so many of their brethren across the nation, a community to protest what they see as corporate greed.

They also created an ideal place for the homeless. Some were already living in the parks, while others were drawn from elsewhere to the encampment’s open doors.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 23 is the 296th day of the year (297th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 69 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1921, in the French town of Chalons-sur-Marne, an American officer selects the body of the first “Unknown Soldier” to be honored among the approximately 77,000 United States servicemen killed on the Western Front during World War I.

According to the official records of the Army Graves Registration Service deposited in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, four bodies were transported to Chalons from the cemeteries of Aisne-Marne, Somme, Meuse-Argonne and Saint-Mihiel. All were great battlegrounds, and the latter two regions were the sites of two offensive operations in which American troops took a leading role in the decisive summer and fall of 1918. As the service records stated, the identity of the bodies was completely unknown: “The original records showing the internment of these bodies were searched and the four bodies selected represented the remains of soldiers of which there was absolutely no indication as to name, rank, organization or date of death.”

The four bodies arrived at the Hotel de Ville in Chalons-sur-Marne on October 23, 1921. At 10 o’clock the next morning, French and American officials entered a hall where the four caskets were displayed, each draped with an American flag. Sergeant Edward Younger, the man given the task of making the selection, carried a spray of white roses with which to mark the chosen casket. According to the official account, Younger “entered the chamber in which the bodies of the four Unknown Soldiers lay, circled the caskets three times, then silently placed the flowers on the third casket from the left. He faced the body, stood at attention and saluted.”

Bearing the inscription “An Unknown American who gave his life in the World War,” the chosen casket traveled to Paris and then to Le Havre, France, where it would board the cruiser Olympia for the voyage across the Atlantic. Once back in the United States, the Unknown Soldier was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.

The World War I Unknown lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda from his arrival in the United States until Armistice Day, 1921. On November 11, 1921, President Warren G. Harding officiated at the interment ceremonies at the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. During the ceremony, the World War I Unknown was awarded the Victoria Cross by Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty, on behalf of King George V of the United Kingdom. (The Victoria Cross being the highest award for valour issued in the UK, on par with the Medal of Honor. Earlier, on March 4, 1921, the British Unknown Warrior was conferred the U.S. Medal of Honor by General of the Armies John Pershing.) In 1928, the Unknown Soldier was presented the Silver Buffalo Award for distinguished service to America’s youth by the Boy Scouts of America.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

After scrapping stricter smog limit, President Barack Obama continues to throw the environment under the bus.

US regulator declines to enforce ‘death penalty’ on oil company despite environmentalists’ fury

The Obama administration has infuriated environmentalists by giving BP the green light to bid for new drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.

The move – seen as a major step in the company’s political rehabilitation as an offshore driller following the Deepwater Horizon accident – was revealed by the head of the US safety regulator after a congressional hearing in Washington.

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BP declined to comment, but Friends of the Earth said it was appalled. “Governments should be administering the death penalty to all deepwater drilling rather than waiting for yet more devastating incidents like the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico or in any other part of the world,” argued Craig Bennett, director of policy and campaigns at the environmental group.

“It is not just BP operations that are deeply flawed,” he added. “There is not a single oil company that can say with a high degree of confidence that it can drill safely and how it will clear up if something goes wrong. It is clear in the context of climate change we need to develop new clean technologies, not hunt for fossil fuels in ever more remote and hard-to-reach areas.”

In May, the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben – pondering a simmering energy issue – asked a NASA scientist to calculate what it would mean for the Earth’s climate if Canada extracted all of the petroleum in its rich Alberta oil sands region.

The answer to McKibben’s query came a month later: it would push atmospheric carbon concentrations so high that humans would be unable to avert a climate disaster. “It is essentially game over,” wrote James E. Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is one of the nation’s leading voices against fossil fuel energy.

“This project represents a collision of multiple national interests and multiple political interests,” said P.J. Crowley, who served as spokesman for the State Department during part of the review process. “Energy security and environment normally go together, but in this case they are somewhat at odds. All have come together to make this a bigger deal than it might have appeared at first blush.”

Charles K. Ebinger, a senior fellow for energy at the Brookings Institution, said the issue has “become a test case for the Democrats” with two factions within the Obama camp asking the same question: “Is he with us or against us?”

“I do think it has become a defining political issue,” Ebinger said. “I don’t think he’s going to win any friends whichever way he goes.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

If you have to ask , you haven’t been listening

Cenk Uygur and “The Young Turks” are at Occupy Wall Street in New York City all week.

In this interview, writer Jesse LaGreca tells Cenk about becoming Fox News public enemy No. 1 after he called out a producer’s biased questions in a clip that made it online, if left on the cutting room floor.

A campaign against arbitrary searches by the NYPD gets a boost from Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street headed to Harlem Friday afternoon in a solidarity march that ended with the arrests of a few dozen protesters including Princeton professor Cornel West – just days after his arrest in Washington, D.C., at another demonstration.

The arrests, which occurred after marchers linked arms in front of a fortress-like NYPD station just off Frederick Douglass Boulevard, were a planned act of civil disobedience.

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Finally, here is West’s speech just a few minutes before he and other protesters were arrested:

The New York Post reported there will be more arrests of Occupy Wall Street participants, who do not abide by New York City laws for demonstrations. Bloomberg also warned that a crackdown was coming.

The Post quoted the Occupy Wall Street media coordinator Thorin Caristo, who stated:

  “His inability to create a clear and definitive opinion or position on OWS just shows he’s being tossed around like a bird in a storm. We all know what that storm is, that storm is the growing concern in the higher factions of Wall Street, that this movement might actually be making a difference…The mayor’s statements sound hardline and I have no doubt he may actually try to enforce those. But we all know that every time excessive police force is used in this situation the movement grows exponentially.”

The city should not take this point lightly. Use of excessive police force or any effort to disperse the encampment will only invigorate the occupation with renewed support. It will only lead to more marches and gatherings that the police will be deployed to babysit. It will only amplify scrutiny of New York City and its police force by the media and the people of the world.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 22 is the 295th day of the year (296th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 70 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1975,Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, is given a “general” discharge by the air force after publicly declaring his homosexuality. Matlovich, who appeared in his air force uniform on the cover of Time magazine above the headline “I AM A HOMOSEXUAL,” was challenging the ban against homosexuals in the U.S. military. In 1979, after winning a much-publicized case against the air force, his discharge was upgraded to “honorable.”

Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich (1943 – June 22, 1988) was a Vietnam War veteran, race relations instructor, and recipient of the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.

Matlovich was the first gay service member to fight the ban on gays in the military, and perhaps the best-known gay man in America in the 1970s next to Harvey Milk. His fight to stay in the United States Air Force after coming out of the closet became a cause celebre around which the gay community rallied. His case resulted in articles in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, numerous television interviews, and a television movie on NBC. His photograph appeared on the cover of the September 8, 1975, issue of Time magazine, making him a symbol for thousands of gay and lesbian servicemembers and gay people generally. In October 2006, Matlovich was honored by LGBT History Month as a leader in the history of the LGBT community.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, he was the only son of a career Air Force sergeant. He spent his childhood living on military bases, primarily throughout the southern United States. Matlovich and his sister were raised in the Roman Catholic Church. He considered himself a “flag-waving patriot,” but always regretted that for several years he maintained the racist attitudes he’d been exposed to as a child of the South. Not long after he enlisted, the United States increased military action in Vietnam, about ten years after the French had abandoned active colonial rule there. Matlovich volunteered for service in Vietnam and served three tours of duty. He was seriously wounded when he stepped on a land mine in DA Nang.

While stationed in Florida near Fort Walton Beach, he began frequenting gay bars in nearby Pensacola. “I met a bank president, a gas station attendant – they were all homosexual,” Matlovich commented in a later interview. When he was 30, he slept with another man for the first time. He “came out” to his friends, but continued to conceal the fact from his commanding officer. Having realized that the racism he’d grown up around was wrong, he volunteered to teach Air Force Race Relations classes, which had been created after several racial incidents in the military in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He became so successful that the Air Force sent him around the country to coach other instructors. Matlovich gradually came to believe that the discrimination faced by gays was similar to that faced by African Americans.

In 1973, previously unaware of the organized gay movement, he read an interview in the Air Force Times with gay activist Frank Kameny who had counseled several gays in the military over the years. He called Kameny in Washington DC and learned that Kameny had long been looking for a gay service member with a perfect record to create a test case to challenge the military’s ban on gays. About a year later, he called Kameny again, telling him that he might be the person. After several months of discussion with Kameny and ACLU attorney David Addlestone during which they formulated a plan, he hand-delivered a letter to his Langley AFB commanding officer on March 6, 1975. When his commander asked, “What does this mean?” Matlovich replied, “It means Brown versus the Board of Education” – a reference to the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case outlawing racial segregation in public schools. For Matlovich, his test of the military’s ban on homosexuals would be equivalent to that case. . .

From the moment his case was revealed to the public, he was repeatedly called upon by gay groups to help them with fund raising and advocating against anti-gay discrimination, helping lead campaigns against Anita Bryant’s effort in Miami, Florida, to overturn a gay nondiscrimination ordinance and John Briggs’ attempt to ban gay teachers in California. Sometimes he was criticized by individuals more to the left than he had become. “I think many gays are forced into liberal camps only because that’s where they can find the kind of support they need to function in society” Matlovich once noted.

With the outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. in the late 1970s, Leonard’s personal life was caught up in the virus’ hysteria that peaked in the 1980s. He sold his Guerneville restaurant in 1984, moving to Europe for a few months. He returned briefly to Washington, D.C., in 1985 and, then, to San Francisco where he sold Ford cars and once again became heavily involved in gay rights causes and the fight for adequate HIV-AIDS education and treatment.

During the summer of 1986, Matlovich felt fatigued, then contracted a prolonged chest cold he seemed unable to shake. When he finally saw a physician in September of that year, he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Too weak to continue his work at the Ford dealership, he was among the first to receive AZT treatments, but his prognosis was not encouraging. He went on disability and became a champion for HIV/AIDS research for the disease which was claiming tens of thousands of lives in the Bay Area and nationally. He announced on Good Morning America in 1987 that he had contracted HIV, and was arrested with other demonstrators in front of the White House that June protesting what they believed was an inadequate response to HIV-AIDS by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

On June 22, 1988, less than a month before his 45th birthday, Matlovich died of complications from HIV/AIDS beneath a large photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. His tombstone, meant to be a memorial to all gay veterans, does not bear his name. It reads, “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” Matlovich’s tombstone at Congressional Cemetery is on the same row as that of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

A Website has been created in his honor and that of other gay veterans, and includes a history of the ban on gays in the military both before and after its transformation into Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and illustrates the role that gay veterans fighting the ban played in the earliest development of the gay rights movement in the United States.

DADT was officially ended on September 20, 2011. We still have a long way to go with equal right for our gay and transsexual brothers and sisters.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

One of the groups that Health Care for the 99% is planning a major event on October 26, Get Wall Street out of Healthcare!! March Against the Health Insurance Industry. There is a planned march to the offices of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, WellCare and St Vincent’s Community Hospital which closed earlier this year due to bankruptcy. St Vincent’s is a casualty of profit-driven insurers and a healthcare system that leaves 50 million Americans uninsured. There are now no hospitals on the westside below 57th st. I am planning on participating in that march. Stay tuned.

Disgruntled Verizon Communications and Verizon Wireless workers and members of the labor union Communications Workers of America will be joining the “Occupy Wall Street” protest Friday in protest of “Verizon’s corporate greed.”

In a press release issued Thursday afternoon, the CWA said that about 1,000 Verizon workers will meet at Verizon’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street at 4 p.m. ET and march past Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park where “Occupy Wall Street” protesters are gathered. The march will end at a Verizon Wireless dealer on Broad Street. Many of the protesters are then expected to return to Liberty Park and stay through the night.

NYers:

LISTEN UP!

Please come to the meeting tonight or send our messages or write about people coming to the meeting of the combined Quality of Life and Financial District subcommittee

Real Estate Board of New York asking the city to prohibit Occupy Wall Street-style use of public space.

In fact, the Real Estate Board of New York is reportedly preparing to ask the city to endorse universally applicable rules prohibiting future Occupy Wall Street-style use of public space, along with the automatic right to close all spaces at night.

REBNY is the 1%.

The Board’s ranks consist of 12,000 owners, builders, brokers, managers, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, real estate investment trusts, utilities, attorneys, architects, marketing professionals and many other individuals and institutions involved in New York realty.

It didn’t sound like this was as bad as they expected. The Board of Realtors would still have to go through the city council process to get any changes and that won’t happen anytime soon.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

October 21 is the 294th day of the year (295th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 71 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1959, On this day in 1959, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, thousands of people line up outside a bizarrely shaped white concrete building that resembled a giant upside-down cupcake. It was opening day at the new Guggenheim Museum, home to one of the world’s top collections of contemporary art.

Guided by his art adviser, the German painter Hilla Rebay, Solomon Guggenheim began to collect works by nonobjective artists in 1929. (For Rebay, the word “nonobjective” signified the spiritual dimensions of pure abstraction.) Guggenheim first began to show his work from his apartment, and as the collection grew, he established The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937. Guggenheim and Rebay opened the foundation for the “promotion and encouragement and education in art and the enlightenment of the public.” Chartered by the Board of Regents of New York State, the Foundation was endowed to operate one or more museums; Solomon Guggenheim was elected its first President and Rebay its Director.

In 1939, the Guggenheim Foundation’s first museum, “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting”, opened in rented quarters at 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street in New York and showcased art by early modernists such as Rudolf Bauer, Hilla Rebay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. During the life of Guggenheim’s first museum, Guggenheim continued to add to his collection, acquiring paintings by Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. The collection quickly outgrew its original space, so in 1943, Rebay and Guggenheim wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright pleading him to design a permanent structure for the collection. It took Wright 15 years, 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings to create the museum. While Wright was designing the museum Rebay was searching for sites where the museum would reside. Where the museum now stands was its original chosen site by Rebay which is at the corners of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue (overlooking Central Park). On October 21, 1959, ten years after the death of Solomon Guggenheim and six months after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright the Museum opened its doors for the first time to the general public.

The distinctive building, Wright’s last major work, instantly polarized architecture critics upon completion, though today it is widely revered. From the street, the building looks approximately like a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art “look like a Protestant barn.”

Internally, the viewing gallery forms a gentle helical spiral from the main level up to the top of the building. Paintings are displayed along the walls of the spiral and also in exhibition space found at annex levels along the way.

Most of the criticism of the building has focused on the idea that it overshadows the artworks displayed within, and that it is particularly difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow windowless exhibition niches that surround the central spiral. Although the rotunda is generously lit by a large skylight, the niches are heavily shadowed by the walkway itself, leaving the art to be lit largely by artificial light. The walls of the niches are neither vertical nor flat (most are gently concave), meaning that canvasses must be mounted proud of the wall’s surface. The limited space within the niches means that sculptures are generally relegated to plinths amid the main spiral walkway itself. Prior to its opening, twenty-one artists, including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, signed a letter protesting the display of their work in such a space.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Click on image to enlarge

One of the key activists behind Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” is now giving advice to a new group of protesters: the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park – and their offshoots around the country – often cite the mass demonstrations earlier this year in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as their inspiration. So maybe it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Ahmed Maher, one of the leading figures in those Egyptian protests, has been corresponding for weeks with the Occupy Wall Streeters, whom he calls “our brothers.”

Maher is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth, which used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to galvanize Egyptians against President Hosni Mubarak. Recently, however, his attention has turned toward America, where he’s been chatting online with Occupy activists. Those conversations center around practical advice from a successful Egyptian revolutionary. Usually, they occur through Facebook. On Tuesday, for the first time, they happened face to face.

“We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in,” Maher tells Danger Room, and “how to be non-violent with police.”

The “30 Rock” star and newly minted podcaster, Baldwin has, during the protesters’ occupation of Wall Street, advocated for tighter bank regulations and more strict enforcement of those regulations. Arriving around midnight, he tweeted at 1:37, “My thanks 2 Aaron from Brooklyn and Sean from Winnipeg for this evening’s OWS tutorial. My first. A lot of dedicated people at #ZuccottiPark.”

He sent out a series of tweets following his departure, saying, “OWS needs to coalesce around some legislative policy. The ‘occupy’ strategy may be an effective one. But what can each entity agree on?” and “Campaign finance reform remains the linchpin of our democracy’s many problems.”

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The star then followed that defense of banks’ existence, saying, “We need a healthy banking system in this country. We need strong capital markets. What is missing are regulations with teeth.”

Two weeks ago we conducted an anonymous poll on this website to learn more about our visitors. We asked Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán Ph.D, sociologist of the City University of New York to look at the data, which he analyzed to create an original academic paper titled “Mainstream Support for a Mainstream Movement” (pdf).

His analysis shows that the Occupy Wall Street movement is heavily supported by a diverse group of individuals and that “the 99% movement comes from and looks like the 99%.” Among the most telling of his findings is that 70.3% of respondents identified as politically independent.

Dr. Cordero-Guzmán’s findings strongly reinforce what we’ve known all along: Occupy Wall Street is a post-political movement representing something far greater than failed party politics. We are a movement of people empowerment, a collective realization that we ourselves have the power to create change from the bottom-up, because we don’t need Wall Street and we don’t need politicians.

Since our humble beginning a few short weeks ago, we’ve helped inspire people around the world to organize democratic assemblies in their own communities to take back public spaces, meet basic needs, make their own demands, and begin building a better world today.

Below is Dr. Cordero-Guzmán’s executive summary of his findings along with a link to his full academic paper.

Author was arrested alongside Occupy Wall Street protesters after she disputed police claims that they had to clear sidewalk

The feminist author Naomi Wolf has criticised the erosion of the right to public protest in the United States after she was arrested alongside Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York.

Wolf was led away in handcuffs after addressing protesters outside an awards ceremony held to honour New York’s governor, at which she was a guest.