Reunion, Rejuvenation – Occupy Congress

January 17, in Washington, DC – the #teamoccupyyourmom / xo99percent reunion at Occupy Congress 

McPherson Square, Washington, DC on October 8, 2011

On Occupy’s four-month anniversary, Occupy Congress will hit the streets of Washington, DC. A grassroots effort, Occupy Congress is planning meetings with Congressional Representatives as well as rallies around the Capitol and a large multi-occupation General Assembly. Many of us will be staying with Occupy K Street in McPherson Square.

This administration has broken the social contract and bond with its citizens. The Occupy Congress Buses are filling up quickly, hopefully bringing thousands of people from across the country to the front steps of Congress.

Why?

Because while Occupiers have been busy with evictions, raids and arrests, Congress passed and President Obama signed the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2012 into law, bringing with it the possibility of indefinite detention for American citizens.

Because we currently face two additional threats to our free speech, access to information and free communication, and our ability to even demand our rights – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Enemy Expatriation Act.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a great resource for news on SOPA, on which debate has been postponed until Congress returns from recess. SOPA, sponsored by seemingly every large corporation, would give the government the power to shut down sites that are even suspected of committing copyright infringement. The bill is being sold as an anti-piracy measure, but its reach is so far beyond that. During the massive campaign to stop SOPA, a Phillies blogger detailed the implications the bill would have on fan sites and blogs. For the sake of transparency, please know that the writer is a long-time friend of mine from college. Ryan says, if he were to post a video of the Humpty Dance to the zoowithroy Phillies blog* -

- I’d be guilty of a felony for linking to that video.

- ZWR would be liable because he owns the site on which it was posted and as such be guilty of a felony and the copyright holder would instantly be allowed to shut down the site permanently.

- The company that hosts ZWR’s webservers is guilty of a felony for hosting the site.

- The guy that uploaded it to YouTube would have committed a felony by uploading it.

- YouTube is guilty of a felony for hosting it and/or not preventing it from being uploaded in the first place and, as such, could be shut down permanently.

- If ZWR were tweet the link to this post, Twitter would also be guilty of a felony and could also be shut-down because they (inadvertently) linked to this post.

Furthermore, SOPA may allow for the government to conduct deep-packet inspection, tracking and analyzing user-transmitted data, a filtering technique famously employed by Iran (aided by Nokia Siemens) to track and find activists in the violent aftermath of the 2009 Presidential elections. During the early days of the Arab Spring, it was reportedly used in Syria, Egypt, Libya and possibly Tunisia for the same purpose.

As for the Enemy Expatriation Act, our corporate-owned media has yet to cover it, but the text of the bill is clear enough:

112^th Congress: 2011-2012

To add engaging in or supporting hostilities against the United States to the list of acts for which United States nationals would lose their nationality.

Couple this with the NDAA and the Department of Defense considering protests low-level terrorism, and it is clear that we have to continue to speak out while we are able.

Occupy Congress is the next necessary step for the Occupy Movement.

Early backlash against the event tried to paint it as an SEIU-organized-or-sponsored event, suggesting that this was the union’s attempt to co-opt the movement, push for Obama 2012, and dilute Occupy’s message. The underlying implication was that Occupy Congress was a Democratic Party event and conservatives should not attend.

I spoke with Occupy Congress organizers, who assured me, “the SEIU has zero role in organizing this event.” This was corroborated by a long-time Occupy K Street activist I’ve met and consider trustworthy. Finally, an unknown individual or group using the hashtag #TCOT (‘Top Conservatives on Twitter’, a standard tag for conservative-leaning members) along with the Occupy Wall Street #OWS tag, issued this promotional poster in support of the action -

A TinEye search of over 2.0757 billion images yielded 0 results, so I don't know where this poster originated.

It’s been a long winter…a long 3+ months. It will be rejuvenating to finally meet Occupiers from across the country who we’ve only seen in video and pictures. We are influencing each other and changing the course of this country. I can think of no better way forward than to meet on January 17, chant nonsense, yell ‘SPOON’ at the top of my lungs, and parade around the Capitol. Please join us.

–xx

More information on #J17 can be found via Occupy Congress -

- on occupyyourcongress.info

- on Twitter as @re_occupy

- and on the Occupy Congress January 17th, 2012 Facebook page

Join the planning on the Occupy Congress Wiki.

–xx

Joanne

*It’s a long season and Phillies bloggers are a strange breed.

No papers, no fear. Immigrants are marching here.

On Saturday, December 3, members of Occupy Birmingham traveled to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama to stand in solidarity with opponents of HB56, Alabama’s harsh anti-immigration bill.

Among those in attendance were undocumented immigrants, such as Victor, a young man who was denied enrollment into any of the collages he was accepted to because, despite growing up in America, he was classified as an international student. Victor stood before the crowd and proclaimed, “I am undocumented and I am unafraid” before launching into a passionate speech.

“I have been here since I was six years old,” Victor said. “I consider myself a Mexican, and American, and a southerner. To anyone who says, ‘what part of illegal don’t you understand?’ I say, ‘what part of humanity don’t you understand?’”

His speech, like all the others, was translated into perfect Spanish. The translators – a young black man and a young white man – were symbolic of the diversity within the crowd.

13-year old Jocelyn stood before her supporters, nearly shaking as she struggled with the bullhorn. At first she just seemed nervous, but soon the extent of her trauma was made known. Her mother, who brought Jocelyn to the United States as a six-year old girl, had fled the state last month with her husband and baby daughter because she feared the implications of HB56. Jocelyn, through tears, spoke of how she begged her mother to let her stay – just one more year – and live with her uncle, because she wants to finish school. “I stayed because I want to fight for my dream – I want to be the first one in my family to graduate,” she said.

Mrs. Mohammad was detained with her husband and 18-year old son in 2009. The family was forced to make the devil’s choice between the two parents. As her husband was the sole wage-earner, they decided he would stay with their remaining children while she joined their son in custody. She was held in detention, not only with other immigrants, but with criminals. Though she pleaded with the prison authorities, they repeatedly made her remove her religious headcovering to be photographed during processing. The photographer was male – a violation of her religious rights and an assault on her dignity. As for her now 21-year old son, he was born in Saudi Arabia but was raised in the United States – his parents brought him here when he was just a year old. “We are not criminals. We are immigrants. We are here to work and raise good children.”

Though our original plans were to surround the facility, we were given permission only to march around the front on the sidewalk. As we marched and chanted, we began to see faces appear in the top windows. They began to rattle – “let our people go” and there they were, able to see our outpouring of love in the form of signs and chants, screams of “we love” you and fingers held up in ‘V’s. “Una familia!” we yelled, and the detainees, our sisters and brothers in bondage, yelled back. Amazingly the detainees held up signs of their own – “Detention = Injustice” and simply, “L-O-V-E-U.”

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The Department of Homeland Security Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request notes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) developed an action plan that reduced the average length of stay (ALOS) for ‘criminal aliens’ by 11 percent in 2009. It makes no mention of the ALOS for non-criminal ‘aliens’.

The Migration Policy Institute report for that same year showed that 34% of ICE detainees had received their final removal orders. Title 8 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) concerns “Aliens and Nationality”. 8 CFR 1241.33 stipulates, “once an order of deportation becomes final, an alien shall be taken into custody and the order shall be executed.” It does not specify how soon the removal is to occur, except that to be no sooner than 72 hours after the service of the final deportation decision. Nothing in the federal statute or the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) dictate how long an alien may be held after receiving their final deportation orders. Of the 10,771 detainees for which a final removal order date was provided, the average length of detention following those orders was 72 days. The average length of time in detention for post-removal order detainees, including time both before and after the final removal orders were issued was 114 days. 1,792 post-removal order detainees had been held for over six months. Information obtained via a FOIA request in January 2009 listed more than 400 detainees without any criminal conviction who had been held for more than a year.

The MPI report also spells out the underlying problem with ICE ‘criminal alien’ numbers – they include persons who have committed immigration-related crimes. For nearly 20% of the detainees in the MPI report “the most serious criminal offense recorded was traffic-related (13%) or immigration-related (6%).” Even with these petty offenses being considered criminal, an astounding 58% of the detainees had no criminal record whatsoever. The report editorializes, “[these detentions are] difficult to explain since mandatory detention laws largely apply to criminal aliens.”

There is an underlying financial incentive here. Though ICE’s FY2009 budget included $63 million for “alternatives to detention” programs, 12 of the 17 of the most immigrant-populated detention facilities were operated by private contractors – correctional facility companies who stand to make a higher profit from every full bed. For FY2012, ICE will pay the Etowah County Detention Center $30 per bed per day.

Laws like Alabama’s HB56 work in tandem with Secure Communities (SCOMM), a mandatory ICE program that allows federal and local law enforcement agencies to share biometric information through the FBI’s IAFIS and DHS’s IDENT programs. A person arrested under HB56 can be held for an additional 48 hours by local law enforcement, allowing ICE agents time to review these databases and detain them for deportation proceedings. The FY2012 budget request for SCOMM is $184 million, a $64 million increase over FY2010, and will expand program deployment to 96% of jurisdictions. DHS maintains that SCOMM will be fully implemented by 2013. Alabama signed on to SCOMM on April 25, 2011.

The IIRIRA combined Deportation and Exclusion proceedings into a new one – Removal, giving immigration judges the power to adjudicate both. §237 reflected the Woodby v. INS, 385 U.S. 276 (1966) decision that immigration officials must demonstrate “clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence” for an immigrant to be deported in order to sustain the specific deportation charge. The court found in Woodby that it is appropriate to place the burden of proof on the government, as is required in other denaturalization cases.

Under the IIRIRA, an immigrant ordered removed but whose home country will not accept returnees may still be administratively ordered removed and held in detention indefinitely. According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, others at Etowah County are victims of torture or persecution in their home countries. Immigrants who cannot be repatriated or who do not qualify for political asylum due to bureaucratic hindrances would, in a just system, be considered stateless people in need of protection, not detention. Article 31 of the 1954 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons protects such persons from expulsion except on grounds of national security or public order. The United States is, however, not a signatory to this convention.

The United States is also not alone in its increasing deportation efforts. Europe and Australia are increasingly hostile to immigrants, even defying the Refugee Convention to deport Iranians who qualify for political asylum due to a clear threat of persecution if forcibly returned. However, as flawed and xenophobic as our immigration laws may be, the people detained in Etowah County are not even being held according to the law.

In Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001), the United States Supreme Court ruled that immigrants subject to removal but who could not be repatriated to their countries of origin could not be detained for longer than six months, barring extenuating circumstances. Though the case dealt specifically with non-citizens who were lawfully admitted to the country, it found that detention longer than six months would raise due process concerns. Specifically, the noted that the statute (INA Subsection 241(a)(6)) may be interpreted to justify indefinite detention. In Clark v. Martinez, 543 U.S. 371 (2005), the court clarified its position regarding to which non-citizens the language applies. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, found that six months was the time reasonably necessary to achieve removal and a non-citizen may be eligible for release if they can demonstrate that their continued detention beyond that period will not further removal in the foreseeable future.

The problem with the Clark ruling here is that it is incumbent upon Etowah County detainees – the same ones who can only speak to their families via television screen and have little access to legal advice – to argue their case.

And this is where we come in.

As Victor said, “Revolutions start with thoughts. Revolutions start at home. We can do this together.”

-xx

Joanne

Happy Tenth

Today is the tenth anniversary of the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act.

As seen from a nearby office building, here’s footage of Oakland, California celebrating. It appears someone mislabeled the fireworks and festivities kicked off a few hours early, but no mind.

Caution: language (and, if that bothers you, consider finding another blog to frequent).

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The Oakland Police Department issued a press release early on October 26 defending their actions. Curiously, the press release claimed, “[t]hose who chose to stay were removed without any reported injuries.”

This video is graphic – it purports to show Marine veteran Scott Olson (the man is wearing a “Veterans for Peace” tshirt but is unable to identify himself) after he was shot by plastic bullets. The most I can attest to is that the man is being carried, is unresponsive, and is indeed bleeding from the head.

Of note – there were reports that the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) ‘sound cannon’ was on-site as well. LRAD is a non-lethal crowd control weapon developed for military use. It was used against protesters at the 2009 G-20 summit in Pittsburgh and can permanently damage hearing. No media has yet emerged confirming that LRAD was used in Oakland last night.

–xx

Also getting in on the celebration were Atlanta and Albuquerque.

Albuquerque

Twenty people had volunteered to be ‘arrestibles‘ after the University of New Mexico refused to extend the permit for Camp Coyote, (Un)Occupy Albuquerque’s name for their site at Yale Park.

University of New Mexico police have confirmed that 35 protesters were arrested on site and an Albuquerque Police Department spokesperson confirmed another two arrests by the department.

–xx

Atlanta

A veteran of the Iraq war tied himself to a tree in Atlanta’s Troy Davis Park as protesters rallied.

53 OccupyAtlanta protesters were arrested overnight after volunteering to remain in the park after the midnight eviction deadline. Early reports say the arrests were largely peaceful, though some protesters were dragged out. Among the arrested were State Senator Vincent Fort, who represents part of Atlanta.

Baltimore had been rumored to be a target for eviction as well, but the Occupy Baltimore account confirmed there was no attempt at enforcement and the camp remained intact as of midday on October 26.

–xx

By the way, if you’ve actually read the text of the PATRIOT Act, you are in the minority. The bill was introduced on October 23, 2001 and passed the next day, with President Bush signing it on October 26. Though Democrats and others, including Ron Paul, later ‘expressed extreme displeasure‘ over not having time to read, deliberate, or debate the bill, it passed in the House 357 to 66 (of 435) and in the Senate by 98 to 1.

Both houses reauthorized it in July 2005, March 2010, and May 2011. For his part, President Obama extended the Act, unchanged, in 2010 and again signed the May 2011 reauthorization.

–xx

Joanne

Photos courtesy of @Adreadonymous, Global Grind, @H_O_G, @northoaklandnow, and Shanna Schultz.

This Finally Happened

I’ve been waiting for this.

From OccupyPolice.org -

There’s a misconception that police aren’t part of the 99% – this should end that misconception.

If your an officer and you wanna talk with us about the occupation in your city, E-Mail us at Solidarity@OccupyPolice.org The world wants to hear your side of the story, unofficial and anonymous if you prefer, we’re here for you – OccupyPolice.org [sic]

NYPD is a layoff away from joining us

I’ve made no secret that, as the daughter of a former police officer, I support the individual officers of the NYPD. I also take issue with chants and demonstrations that fracture the 99% – we have too much to overcome to play into divisions.

After Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas’s now-infamous “there is no honor in this” speech and Mayor Bloomberg’s ongoing attempt to cut NYPD and FDNY pensions, it was only a matter of time. Many of us have stories from the front lines of Occupies about officers winking at marchers, turning their heads the other way, or letting protesters walk out of arrest situations. We must remember that these men and women are overworked, underpaid, and often under a lot of pressure. There are, of course, always those who take things too far (“my Bologna has a first name, it’s ‘A-s-s-h-o-l-e’…”) but Occupy Police is a step in the first direction.

Justin “Filthy Liberal Scum” Rosario mused yesterday, “What Happens If The Cops Won’t Beat Protesters On Command?“

Occupy Police has taken that first, most important, step. It has sent out a signal to the police that they are part of the 99% and that they can stand with us even as they are ordered to assault us. If it grows as the rest of the Occupy movement has, the individual officer will find that they are not alone in their distaste for the tactics they are ordered to use. They will find that many of their fellow officers recognize that they, too, are of the 99% and that they, too, are fed up with a system that would enslave them for the benefit of those that despise them.

You can follow Police For The 99% on Twitter as @Occupy_Police, and show your support on Facebook by liking their page.

-xx

Joanne

On to K Street

New York was supposed to be a test run.

Kenneth and I had decided, months ago, that we would be attending the October 2011 events – advertised as 111 days of occupation, practically on the White House’s front lawn. When we later heard that New York would be hosting something similar on September 17, we decided it would be good practice – likely to be a small event that would prepare us for October. Ha.

@OccupyKSt is currently occupying McPherson Square, of which K Street marks the northern border. They plan to join with Stop the Machine in Freedom Plaza on Thursday, October 6 for a joint rally. What will happen from there is uncertain, but it has promise. And it’s important.

K Street, Washington, DC

Occupying K Street is the next natural step in our efforts with the Occupy Movement. It is the nexus of corporate greed and political corruption. K Street is both the symbolic and functional home for most of the lobbying that occurs in the United States. There is a well-known revolving door between the powerful professional lobbying firms and government positions, including those in the White House and regulatory agencies. Through K Street, the financial industry ‘donated‘ $58 million to Democrats and $44 million to Republicans in 2009. Between 2008 and 2010, Wall Street banks and related interest groups hired 243 lobbyists (about 40 per bank) formerly employed in the federal government.

–xx

The Money

The Open Secrets database breaks down the influence in a number of ways – clients, individual lobbyists or firms, industries, interests, and issues. The numbers are staggering. From 1998 to 2010, the total spent on lobbying jumped from $1.44 billion to $3.51 billion. Already for 2011, $1.67 billion has been spent.

The top spender is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. At $770 billion, it more than triples the second-ranked American Medical Association. The Chamber of Commerce has already spent $31.6 on behalf of Business Associations this year. Interestingly, one of its clients is the Cyber Security Research Consultants company in Alexandria, VA.

Spending from the Banking and Financial industries (numbers for 2010) -

Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate – $475.3 billion

Securities and Investment, including Ameriprise Financial, Blackstone Group, and Goldman Sachs – $101.55 billion

Commercial Banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase – $56.6 billion

Finance and Credit Companies, including Visa, Mastercard, and General Electric – $37.2 billion

Mortgage Bankers and Brokers - $16.8 billion

Private Equity and Investment Firms – $15.7 billion

Credit Unions – $9.75 billion

–xx

The Supercommittee

The supercommittee’s K Street connections

via a Washington Post article from September 2, ninety former staffers of ‘Supercommittee’ members were former lobbyists in the Healthcare, Defense, Energy and Transportation, Technology and Medicine, Agricultural, Financial, and other sectors. 7 current staffers are former lobbyists from those areas. More importantly, these lobbyists represent clients with a ‘vested interest’ in the Supercommittee’s decisions.

–xx

So we will be leaving for DC tomorrow, October 6. But we’ll be back. Sitting on a couch at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania, I feel almost as if I’m going through a bit of reverse-culture shock. I miss Liberty Plaza already, and there are no drummers here.

A letter from Mexico

Charlie spoke at the GA meeting today. He arrived this morning from Mexico and brought a letter from the Don Sergio Mendez Arceo Foundation, which annually presents a human rights prize.

Pericón is a Mexican marigold.  In the tradition of milpa agriculture practices of the Nahuas, Charlie tied crosses made of pericón to trees on the four corners of Liberty Park.

Principles of Solidarity

The Principles are a living document that is continually refined through General Assembly process, involving crowd-sourcing.

Second draft September 24, 2011

First draft September 22, 2011

with thanks to @ghostpickles.