This blog exposes the intelligence operation that is #OccupyWallStreet. This movement is being set up to fail so that martial law can be declared once people take to the streets. Don't let the "American Autumn" turn into mob rule like the phony "Arab Spring". Expose Wall Street; Don't Occupy It. Get An Occupation And Invest In Yourself. Organize your local communities and educate them about real issues like 9/11 and the Federal Reserve.
A Long Island couple dreaming of cashing in on the Occupy Wall Street protests has filed for trademark rights to the movement’s name so they can peddle bumper stickers, T-shirts, beach bags and other gear bearing the OWS logo.
Occupy Wall Street’s Finance Committee has nearly $500,000 in the bank, and donations continue to pour in -- but its reluctance to share the wealth with other protesters is fraying tempers.
Some drummers -- incensed they got no money to replace or safeguard their drums after a midnight vandal destroyed their instruments Wednesday -- are threatening to splinter off.
“F--k Finance. I hope Mayor Bloomberg gets an injunction and demands to see the movement’s books. We need to know how much money we really have and where it’s going,” said a frustrated Bryan Smith, 45, who joined OWS in Lower Manhattan nearly three weeks ago from Los Angeles, where he works in TV production.
William Farrington
NEST IN PEACE: Protester Dylan Spoelstra smirks yesterday from his high perch amid the workings of the sculpture “Joie de Vivre” in Zuccotti Park.
Smith is a member of the Comfort Working Group -- one of about 30 small collectives that have sprung up within OWS. The Comfort group is charged with finding out what basic necessities campers need, like thermal underwear, and then raising money by soliciting donations on the street.
“The other day, I took in $2,000. I kept $650 for my group, and gave the rest to Finance. Then I went to them with a request -- so many people need things, and they should not be going without basic comfort items -- and I was told to fill out paperwork. Paperwork! Are they the government now?” Smith fumed, even as he cajoled the passing crowd for more cash.
The Finance Committee dives on whatever dollars are raised by all the OWS working groups, said Smith, and doesn’t give it back.
The Comfort group has an allowance of $150 a day, while larger working groups, like the Kitchen group, get up to $2,000.
“What can I do with $150?” said Smith. “We have three tons of wet laundry here from the rainstorm -- how do I get that done? We need winter gear, shoes, socks. I could spend $10,000 alone for backpacks people need. We raise all this money. Where is it?”
Pete Dutro, 36, a Brooklyn tattoo artist who is getting a master’s in finance and sits on the Finance Committee, said big purchases like Smith’s can’t get immediate approval.
“We don’t have the power for that. They have to go to the General Assembly. If it’s approved, we pay out that amount and make sure everything is accounted for,” he said.
Within the next few days, the Financial Committee will release a detailed report, he said.
Yesterday, a huge flat-screen TV went up in Zuccotti Park for a movie night and pajama party with popcorn. Organizers hoped it would attract new recruits -- even as some long-timers complained that the movement was getting too diffuse after yesterday’s lackluster showing at a police-brutality event in Union Square that barely attracted 50 participants.
“I think it’s getting too spread out,” said John Glowa, 57. “My sense from where I live is that it’s losing steam. We gotta plug the holes.”
Some activists, like those in Pulse, the committee that represents Zuccotti Park drummers, are a bit worn out by all the collective activity.
Last week, on a rainy night, someone stabbed holes in many of the protesters’ drums with a knife, said Elijah Moses, 19, of Queens, a founder of the Pulse Working Group. Moses asked the General Assembly -- the nightly meeting where protesters collectively vote on OWS decisions -- for $8,000 to replace the drums, and build a small shed to lock them up.
“They said no -- they turned us down. I’m really frustrated,” said Moses.
The history of OTPOR/CANVAS US Government NGO/CIA manufactured revolutions (e.g., Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, Occupy Wall Street).
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/occu_pie_the_kitchen_PIZ7EsDJEZqzPgzzEWKX7I Protest mob is enjoying rich diet By REBECCA ROSENBERG October 19, 2011
They may sleep in the park, but they eat like kings.
Hundreds of grimy protesters laying siege to Wall Street and stuffed into the now-smelly Zuccotti Park dine each night on gourmet meals prepared by a former hotel chef using only the finest organic ingredients.
“We’re running a five-star restaurant down there,’’ crowed Eric Smith, 38, the ex-le Chef de Tournant at the Sheraton in Midtown, who works out of a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn, churning out the meals for more than 1,000 protesters every day.
“The other day, we made some wonderful salmon cakes with dill sauce and some quinoa salad and a wonderful tomato salad with fennel and red onion,’’ he said.
“We use organic, grass-fed meats, and the other day, we made a wonderful fried rice and root vegetables and all kinds of soup.”
So last night, for example, while your family of four may have been forced to resort to Hamburger Helper, thanks to Smith’s culinary magic, hordes of Occupy Wall Street protesters instead feasted on organic chicken, spaghetti Bolognese, roasted beet and sheep’s milk-cheese salad and wild heirloom potatoes.
Most of the produce, grass-fed meat and organic chicken is donated from small organic farms upstate, including Northland Sheep Dairy, West Haven Farm and Wide Awake Bakery in Ithaca, and several farms in Connecticut and Vermont.
When food is ready for the protesters, a driver collects crates from each of the cooperative farms and drives to New York City with a truckload of goodies.
Smith, a 20-year culinary veteran, said he used to oversee banquets that fed more than 1,000 at a luxurious hotel -- until he was laid off last year.
He has since turned to catering and teaching to pay the bills, but volunteered at the protests.
At the beginning, the group did much of its cooking in people’s homes.
“Then, we had the ‘99 percent’ march on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were so many people after that it wasn’t realistic to cook in private homes anymore,” said Heather Squire, 31, an unemployed, off-site kitchen coordinator from Williamsburg.
“We knew we needed to increase our capacity,” she said. “We were reaching out to realtors, church groups, and anyone else we could find to lease space.”
Then, last Wednesday, Pastor Leo Karl, of Overcoming Love Ministries, an East New York soup kitchen, entered the picture, and offered his space for food preparation, organizers said.
“I support their needs, because I support anyone who has needs in New York,’’ Karl told The Post. “It’s a five-star soup kitchen.”
On Saturdays, when the protester ranks swell, up to 12 cooks stir the pots.
A driver then picks up the meals, and the food is served by 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday.
“It was so exciting that right at this moment of all this anxiety about how we’re going to feed all these people, someone stepped up to help,” Squire said.
“I couldn’t even believe how everything fell into place.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/egypt-occupy-wall-street/ Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street By Spencer Ackerman October 18, 2011
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.”
That’s the message he brings to D.C.’s McPherson Square, home of the local Occupy offshoot, for an impromptu Tuesday afternoon visit. The denizens of the downtown park flock to an excited Maher when they learn an Egyptian revolutionary is there to support them. “We kept peaceful, because we wanted to attract people to us,” Maher explains. “If we used nonviolence, without killing any soldiers, then the people would help us.”
The Egyptian revolution hasn’t exactly panned out in the way that young democrats like Maher hoped: Cairo’s military has been brutally cracking down on what it sees as enemies of the state. And the Occupy movement is still maddeningly vague about its goals. Nevertheless, to Maher, helping the U.S. protesters is only natural. For one thing, April 6 Youth took its own inspiration from “many revolutions in Eastern Europe and non-violence strategy, from Gandhi and Martin Luther King,” says Maher, who’s in Washington D.C. for a few days thanks to an American University professor.
For another, Egypt’s democracy movement is also a movement for economic justice — one with personal resonance for Maher. “We want to improve the labor laws, the relationship between the owner and employees, because I was fired from my job several times and they were calling for security,” he says. You could almost imagine Maher, a civil engineer, on the We Are The 99 Percent Tumblr.
Maher is a controversial figure within the Egyptian democracy movement, as some consider him dictatorial and polarizing. But he was a pioneer in showing Egyptians that social networks could be powerful political organization tools. For that, Mubarak’s goons jailed him for three months before this year’s #Jan25 Revolution, and targeted his comrades in April 6 during it.
Now the Occupy activists are essentially paying Maher and his allies forward. On Sunday, the Occupy Wall Street website cheered the movement’s expansion to 1,500 cities around the world with an article headlined, “From Tahrir Square to Times Square.” The movement says it is “inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy and the U.K.”
D.C. is no different. When Marc Smith, a 20something manning Occupy D.C.’s tech tent — mostly Dell and Toshiba for Tweeting, Facebooking and running the live feed from the park — learns that Maher is on his way to McPherson Square, his eyes go wide and asks if Maher was the “dude from Google.” Actually, that was Wael Ghonim, the Google exec whom Mubarak detained.
“They’ve got paintings up here of Gandhi and MLK,” Smith says. “Someone should paint [Ghonim]. He did a lot over there.”
One of the biggest pieces of advice Maher says he tells the Occupy groups: Don’t sweat the details. “Stay focused on the main issues,” he says. “For 18 days in Tahrir Square, we were united to take Mubarak down.” For a movement often criticized for incoherent messaging, it may be a resonant piece of advice.
So when Maher arrives in McPherson Square — occupied by about 75 people and nearly as many tents — he asks Metcalf: what’s the “one big idea” that the Occupy movement can rally around? Metcalf says they’re “still searching” for it.
Maher, who started snapping pictures on his phone as soon as he got to the park, has more questions. “Are you guys on Facebook, on Twitter? How are you attracting people?”
That’s more in Metcalf’s comfort zone. “We are tweeting, we are Facebooking,” he tells Maher. “There’s a tech tent over there, and there are reporters everywhere. We’re gonna be here as long as it takes.”
Maher ultimately gives Occupy D.C. the thumbs-up. “It’s very good,” he says, “I feel very happy here.”
Maher is only in Washington until the end of the week. After that, he’s headed for New York — where, he says, he’ll go to Occupy Wall Street, the movement he helped inspire, to show his support.
