#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

For the breaking developments on this ongoing citizens action, please check the main hashtag for this peaceful demonstration here: http://twitter.com/#!/OccupyWallStNYC

Reports are coming in fast and furious from NYC Disinfonauts about the breakup of the ongoing actions in downtown Manhattan today. Numerous advocacy and citizens’ action groups came together beginning on Saturday to protest the ongoing consolidation of wealth from citizens to corporations, using the backdrop of the financial district to attempt to gain the attention of the national and international news media, located a scant 40 blocks north fo their efforts, but the media blackout continues.

Taken from the Adbusters / OWS website Occupy Wall Street:

Three hundred spent the night, several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day and as we write this, the encampment is digging in for a long-term stay. Now, it is crucial for everyone from all over the world to flock to the encampment. Call in to work sick,…

US President Barack Obama signed into law Sunday a bill to compensate emergency responders sickened in the rubble of the September 11 attacks, the White House said in a statement.

The president is currently in Hawaii, where he spent the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and was expected back in Washington on Tuesday. He had been due to sign the bill at the Kaneohe Marine base near his vacation home.

The US Congress on December 22 approved a 10-year, four-billion-dollar program to help police, firefighters and other workers made ill by the fumes left in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on US soil.

The Senate and then the House of Representatives passed the measure after a last-minute compromise ended a Republican blockade in one of the final acts of the Democrat-led US Congress.

[Continues at The Raw Story]

The author of a new book about the CIA’s hallucinogenic drug tests during the Cold War says there’s evidence the agency used NYC commuters as their experimental subjects. He found documentation of the subway tests — which allegedly occurred in 1950 — while researching his nonfiction account. "The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks," H.P. Albarelli told the Post. One piece of evidence cited in A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments is a declassified FBI report from Aug. 25, 1950. "The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed," it says. Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, a former CIA research scientist, says that the aerosol LSD tests did in fact happen, though little is known about their scale and results.

In 1935, the NY Times published an article titled, “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer,” tracing the actions of 16-year-old Salvatore Condoluci and his comrades, who trapped and killed an 8-foot-long alligator found under 123rd Street. Today, at 92, Condoluci still remembers some of the tale, and the Times looks back at the urban legend. Along with the printed article, former superintendent of city sewers, Teddy May, also had a part in giving the legend legs. He once investigated reports of sightings, relaying his story to writer Robert Daley, who in 1959 published the account in his book, The World Beneath the City. It goes like this: "Alligators serenely paddling around in his sewers. The beam of his own flashlight had spotlighted alligators whose length, on the average, was about two feet. Some may have been longer. Avoiding the swift current of the trunk lines under major avenues, the beasts had wormed up the smaller pipes under less important neighborhoods, and there Teddy had found them. The colony appeared to have settled contentedly under the very streets of the busiest city in the world." No one seems to be certain if the story is fact or fiction, but the belief is that many vacationing families were bringing back baby alligators as pets from Florida at the time, later discarding them. Adding more documentation to the legend, Times columnist Meyer Berger once wrote that in the mid-1930s, "sewer alligators seemed to thrive below the pavement in rather frightening numbers. They were destroyed systematically and the threat of an alligator invasion died away.”

November 3, 2009 I feel closer to solving the riddle of activism in 2009. We’ve known how conservative the Democrat/Working Families and the Republican/Independence Parties are. It’s Coke and Pepsi, it’s McDonalds and Burger King. The two party system enforces a strict censorship. We had to experience first-hand the harsh silence of it. The hundreds upon hundreds of articles in the New York Times that never mention a third party… we had to experience this first-hand. It goes hand in hand with the arresting of people in small groups, such as peace vigils in the parks, surrounded by police and surveillance. The criminalizing of dissent goes hand in hand with the $50 million built environment of electronic ads. The imitation of democracy continues on our televisions and computers, but you can’t practice it yourself in public space...]]> In local politics, as well as national, we needs third party voices to be heard. Now more than ever.

via Rev Billy for Mayor

November 3, 2009
I feel closer to solving the riddle of activism in 2009. We’ve known how conservative the Democrat/Working Families and the Republican/Independence Parties are. It’s Coke and Pepsi, it’s McDonalds and Burger King. The two party system enforces a strict censorship. We had to experience first-hand the harsh silence of it.

The hundreds upon hundreds of articles in the New York Times that never mention a third party… we had to experience this first-hand. It goes hand in hand with the arresting of people in small groups, such as peace vigils in the parks, surrounded by police and surveillance. The criminalizing of dissent goes hand in hand with the $50 million built environment of electronic ads. The imitation of democracy continues on our televisions and computers, but you can’t practice it yourself in public space. The mainstream press acts as if it is the commons of our democracy. They pretend that they don’t notice how far it’s gone. By not questioning Consumerism as a totalizing economy, they disappear farther and farther into their minor cleverness. We read articles about how Bloomberg chooses his leather coat for his latest ad, or where he parks his Falcon 900 jet. I would laugh at this if I wasn’t running, but as a candidate I directly feel how tortured these writers have become, putting up walls against the inflow of crucial and new ideas, but also refusing to write about things far more interesting. I’m ending our campaign today by walking through the three downtown parks, Washington Square, Union Square and Tompkins Square. I’ll carry my small electronic bullhorn without a permit, as I have throughout the campaign. I’ll talk to small groups of folks about how our voices carry, and how our voices don’t carry, in this strange $100 million Playstation that Bloomberg’s turned our city into. And I’m glad I ran because I’ve been reminded that I’m not the only one still talking. There is a coalition of immigrants and artists, students and bloggers and parents in the boroughs – talking back against this expensive media wind. There is a radical freedom in the most ordinary sounding conversations on the corner. Our voices are carrying enough when we walk together, when we talk across a subway car. One part of our city is at war with the rest of us, and tries to normalize this violence with thousands of hours of family-friendly images of happy leaders. But we still have the basics of free speech, the immanence of gestures and language in our bodies. That’s why the police study us so hard – we are considered incendiary in our flesh. We could do anything. And in fact, gatherings of people in their physical form in public space – that is how history’s change has always arrived. It is from our bodies that our voices carry. If they try to shut down our public air, well, we haven’t stopped loving the acoustics in our public places, the American sound of our rising voice.

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