by Richard Hugus

March 3, 2012

New York City appears to be going all out to win a world award for racism and bigotry. On February 24 the New York Post published a cartoon (1)   depicting three men with long noses, long beards, turbans, and dishdashas assembling bombs in a locked upstairs tenement room. One of the men has a bomb strapped to his waist. He is looking out a window at an New York Police Department car in the street. The cartoon shows him speaking into the phone: “Hello, AP Press? . . . I’d like to register a complaint against the N.Y.P.D. for spying on us.”

Latest report from Pavlov Katz

Hi folks,

Time marches on, in the constant madness that is Occupy Wall Street, within the constant madness that is New York City, within the constant madness that is the earth in 2012.

I’ve made a point of attending more marches lately, realizing that this is one of the best ways to let people know that we’re still here even though we’re not in the park. One was a march against the NDAA. For those who don’t know, the National Defense Authorization Act allows the government to detain any US citizen and hold him or her indefinitely without trial if they suspect them of aiding an organization which aids al Qaeda or the Taliban. The problem is that they don’t have to prove to anyone this connection, so anyone who criticizes the US government might conceivably fall into this category. There would be no judge or jury to say otherwise.

It’s especially ironic because the US government has given billions of dollars in assistance to the Pakistani government and military, which has aided al Qaeda and the Taliban with millions if not billions of dollars worth of assistance in the form of weapons, trucks, food and cash. So according to the NDAA, anyone connected with the US government, military or weapons industry could technically be held indefinitely without trial. This would include the president and any members of congress who voted for any of these military assistance bills.

From a friend of Steve… Pavlov Katz

Hi everyone,

It’s been a really long time since I last wrote. I left New York for a few weeks in early December, and returned later in the month. The timing wasn’t too good, since very little happened around here during the holidays, and there was a lot of frustrating, idle time. One positive thing that did happen during that time, though, was that a lot of people worked on creating a sense of community among us who are staying at one of the churches in the upper west side. I’d originally thought of it as simply a place to sleep, and to simply leave in the morning and start my real day downtown at OWS. But some more insightful people saw it as more than that, as a chance to develop our identity as a group, a subsection of OWS. The original motivation for this might have been simple necessity– to reduce thefts and conflicts, but in any case, it’s turned into an actual community, an opportunity to meet new people and work together constructively.

Otherwise, things were scattered and thin through late December, until New Year’s eve. Earlier in the evening a few of us went around town, happy to get away from the uninspired atmosphere, but came back to the area and walked into Zuccotti Park around 10 pm. Several hundred people were there, a low-level party. More people arrived steadily, and the absurdity of the situation became embarrassingly apparent. Here we are, 300, 400, 500 of us, in a park we lived in, a park from which we changed world history, until a mere six ago. And now we’re surrounded by standing metal barricades which enforce arbitrary, stupid rules which are arguably illegal. Say, what about these standing metal barricades, anyway?

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.