This is the latest report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street.

Hi everyone,

It’s been slow around here since my last post. Strange to say this, since up to recently things have been frantic.

We’re still hanging in, securing housing for ourselves and running meetings again. I went to a spokes council meeting the other night. It was kind of nice to see the process functioning. Spokes council is a cumbersome process, but it’s quite democratic. Of course, it’s a messy process, lots of arguments, and then the next day everyone else yells about the decisions made. Once you explain the reasons, they lower the volume of their yelling a bit. I suppose groups making decisions about how to conduct themselves is by nature complicated and controversial and always will be.

The past few days in particular have been difficult. A lot of people arguing, about all kinds of things. I think this is partly because we’re all stressed about not having a home, and partly because we’re confused about our mission at this point. With Thanksgiving coming up it’s unlikely much will be done about this in the next few days.

This is the latest report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street. It sounds like it is becoming an occupied territory, with the NYPD playing the role of the IDF and controlling movement of people and goods in and out.

Hi everyone,

It’s Saturday morning, things are actually quiet enough for me to sit and write. Here’s what happened since my last, kind of frantic, message early Thursday afternoon.

I walked over to City Hall where I heard a rally was supposed to be held to demand Bloomberg’s resignation. I just missed it, people had already left for Foley Square. On the way over I made another attempt to call someone here at the storage place, and by chance happened to catch him, and find out the space was open, so I turned around and came back here. Had I not reached him, I would have gone to Foley Square and then to the Brooklyn Bridge, and witnessed history, or gotten arrested, or beaten up.

You probably know better than me what happened there. I don’t have video capabilities on this old computer. In any case, there were many, many people in Foley Square, and even more at the bridge, 5,000, I heard? Lots of pushing and shoving, hundreds of arrests throughout the day, I think. I was here helping restore the medical supplies shelf when one of the medics got a call that trouble was about to start, and we helped pack up bandages, etc. We were out of Maalox, which is used as an antidote to pepper spray. The shelf has thinned out considerably this week, since the police took the medical tent and all the supplies they had there.

This is one of a number of reports from my friend Steve who has been a part of Occupy Wall Street since October 5th. I will try to post his earlier reports because they give good insight into what is happening at the heart of an emergent revolution.

Hi everyone,

First of all, I’m okay. I did get arrested but was released later that day, it wasn’t too bad.

So here’s my take on Monday night/Tuesday morning.

I was in my tent around midnight getting ready to go to sleep when I heard someone yelling. Someone’s always yelling there, but this was different, more frantic, and someone else yelled, “Get out of your tents.” I opened the flap and saw that the police across the street (the side street on the north side of the park) had set up a huge panel of lights and were flooding the park with them. Another similar panel was on the other side. There’d been a lot of strange police behavior since I got there, but never anything like this. I knew something was up, so I put my shes on and ran out.

For a while I milled around in the park, not sure what to do. I was thinking of leaving. I ran back and got my bag out of the tent. It was a chaotic scene. We all pretty much knew they were going to raid. People were yelling and screaming different things, some people were afraid, others defiant, others confused. I was pretty nervous, my hands were trembling a little, and I was confused. I talked with a few people, let someone write legal aid’s phone # on my arm with a sharpie, and discovered that a few level-headed people I knew were planning on staying and getting arrested, and I decided I would stay, too.

Cambridge, Massachusetts is the East Coast’s Berkeley, California. Its crunchy reputation — from hippie/granola to People’s Republic — is well-earned on average, but, well, a bit off-target and way out of date. You see, since rent control was thrown out by the end of 1994, Cambridge has seen a dramatic erosion of its working class communities. And going back to 1940, when the Plan E / City Manager form of government was first instituted, the elites have found it easier and easier to pull the strings on policies of social upheaval and community destruction.

While no substitute for reading Bill Cunningham’s historical backgrounder Which People’s Republic?, he manages to sum it all up in one sentence:

In Cambridge, these policies have uprooted poor and working class communities in order to cultivate, on the same soil, the University City.

And for all the feel-good progressivism that pervades this city, there is an underbelly of corruption, liberalism, and exploitation that stink up the place. The racial diversity is lovely, but quietly growing apartheid conditions and a fierce, latent racism mean that such feel-good sentiments are dangerous illusions. And while it’s lovely that we are sister cities with so many others around the world, we are on a path of social destruction here at home. I am proud and grateful to live in a city that has an active, funded Peace Commission, but I am ashamed to live in a city with a more active, better-funded city government that colludes to protect the elite university, biotech, and developer interests at the expense of its own people.

So it is with a bit of glee that I observe the unfolding drama around the wrongful-termination lawsuit that is haunting City Manager Bob Healy and the complicit City Council. It’s rare that all the corruption, hypocrisy, and racism hiding under the veneer of all the many positives that Cambridge has going for it bubble to the surface in one instance.

Peter Vickery gave me chills today, when he painted the picture of what will happen on October 18th this fall, when Mark C. Miller becomes the first-ever Green-Rainbow Party candidate elected to the State House. Mark, who received an extraordinary 45% of the vote against an incumbent Democrat in his first time running for office,  spending just over $3,000, would raise $20,000 this go-round, and run a 90-day sprint to reach the 4,000 Unenrolled voters in his district.

Mark followed up this grand introduction by pointing out one key difference from his 2010 run — this time he’d have a campaign manager, Peter Vickery. He then proceeded to outline what he was struggling with as a candidate, and what he was yearning to bring to the 3rd Berkshire District. And there was no simple rhetoric available to him, no campaign playbook for messaging his vision for Pittsfield, the Berkshires, and the Commonwealth. He is looking to run a transformative campaign, sparking the economic, cultural, and political transformation that Pittsfield and the rest of the state is burning for.

Transformation is what we need, and Mark’s victory will indeed be a transformative act. It’s easily within our grasp if we rise to this exciting — joyous was Mark’s word — 90-day challenge and make it happen.

Part of the challenge will be communicating the idea of a transformative campaign in a way that connects with the average voter in Pittsfield, and re-connects with those who have given up on the political system entirely. It will be a crowded field for this open seat, and there’s a mountain to climb to win it. But we have 93 days in which to do it. 93 days to change Massachusetts politics forever.

Local Green Paki Weiland makes a cameo in this Democracy Now! report on the Greek government’s intervention blocking civilian ships from leaving Greek ports to travel to Gaza:

Paki was arrested twice for fasting and protesting the U.S Embassy and the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, and her story and that of the Greek intervention was picked up in The Daily Hampshire Gazette and The Republican. From the Gazette:

The Canadian vessel in the fleet, “Tahrir,” was detained off the coast of Crete and returned to port on Monday. The Irish and Norwegian boats were sabotaged when their propeller shafts were cut before setting sail. The activists asserted that Israel was behind the sabotage, but the Israeli Embassy in Dublin denied those claims.

Additionally, Greek protesters rallying against austerity measures in Syntagma Square in Athens have taken up the flotilla’s cause and organized a march to support the effort to reach Gaza.

Interesting times!

The New Economics Institute, in lead-up to the 100th Anniversary of writer and philosopher E.F. Schumacher’s birth on August 16th, sent out excerpts from a 2008 essay about Schumacher’s relevance today:

“The Relevance of E. F. Schumacher in the 21st Century”

By John Fullerton

Our global economic system is broken not because of the credit crisis; it is broken because it is predicated on perpetual, resource driven growth with no recognition of scale limitations.

What we are not hearing, at least in the mainstream media, is a critical reframing of the questions that address root causes….. We are not hearing a debate about the sustainability of a perpetually growing global economic system nested within our finite biosphere.  We are not hearing a debate about the wisdom of allowing financial power (and systemic risk) to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few financial institutions of increasing complexity and scale.  We are not publicly questioning the wisdom of the system we have allowed to evolve in response to capital’s quest for ever increasing financial returns.  Nor are we debating where to look for creative responses.

However, nothing could be more important at this critical time.  What we must grasp is that the financial crisis we are reacting to is but a cyclical side show to the bigger issues we face regarding the sustainability of our economic system.  We should see the present financial crisis as a wake up call to this far greater challenge.  We should search with an open mind for the wisdom we need to transition our economic system onto a sustainable path, grounded in ecological reality, with a respect for human justice and a deep appreciation for all life.

Continued after the jump