To the surprise of some (yours truly), apparently the excavation by Exxon Mobile of the sidewalk outside of my apartment house – part of decades of ongoing efforts at remediating the 30-million gallon Greenpoint Oil Spill – is to be a civil affair.
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You can tell you live in an undemocratic democracy when we need a term to describe citizens making decisions on how to spend the city budget. This term is: Participatory Budgeting. The term itself seems to imply what we already know: that the rest of the budgeting being done is anything but “participatory,” (leaving aside the petty idea that once we elect someone their decisions become ours, ipso-facto).
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Church of the Ascension on Java Street has been Occupied. The church, which began helping coordinate relief efforts (with Councilmember Steve Levin) for Hurricane Sandy survivors immediately after the storm, has just been more formally Occupied by Occupy Sandy, an off-shoot of Occupy Wall Street. The Greenpoint site is largely replacing the 520 Clinton Street location at the Church of St Luke and St Matthew in Clinton Hill, after a December 23rd two-alarm fire at that location which fire officials have called “suspicious” and Church Father Chris Ballard called “arson.”
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ExxonMobil dropped off a letter today at the apartment, no stamp or name and addressed only to “Dear Neighbor” in a tipped haphazard typewriter’s letters. This intimacy is creepy from one of the most massive entities in the world. Did ExxonMobil just drop by and leave a letter, being sorry they had missed me?
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One successful campaign that has emerged from the Occupy Wall Street movement has been Strike Debt, a group focused on debt education and debt refusal.
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A teach-in for Bradley Manning, Wikileaks and Julian Assange was held on Friday, October 22nd, in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan. Independent journalist Alexa O’Brien, writer Chase Madar and others spoke to a crowd assembled in Bryant Park.
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It has been over two weeks since Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, devastating neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island – as well as many other places in the region. The relief response has been sometimes overwhelmingly large from activists and community groups and individuals, working with scant resources and doing what many expected the city to do but has not: to help those most affected in a time of crisis.
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The Greenpoint Reformed Church‘s volunteers prepared more than 1,000 bag lunches over the weekend, on top of thousands of meals prepared by the Church’s volunteers throughout the week as a relief effort for those affected by Hurricane Sandy.
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Protesters of the controversial and unconstitutional NYPD practice of Stop and Frisk are currently on trial in Queens. Four people arrested protesting Stop & Frisk in Jamaica Queens in November 2011, are currently on trial: Carl Dix, teacher Jamel Mims, Morgan Rhodewalt and Bob Parsons. All four have been charged with Obstruction of Government Administration charges, which could carry one year in jail for each defendant, for chanting protests on the steps of the 103rd precinct, which at the time had been barricaded by police.
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We were at the Red Cube by 7:15am, joining hundreds of other Occupiers and supporters for the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Liberty Square itself was barricaded, a dozen or so people inside – I assumed Occupiers, since what neighborhood resident would be trying to enjoy their park this early on a Monday with so many barricades and police about?
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