Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Stories of the Day: Surveillance cameras are now so powerful they are able to zoom in and read your text messages – leading to fears of further privacy intrusion by a “Big Brother”-style state. As well as being advanced enough to close in on an individual’s phone screen, security cameras will soon be able to pick up on raised voices and sniff out drugs too. The revelations were made at a privacy conference in Wellington, New Zealand, where it was also disclosed that the average person is digitally recorded about a dozen times a day. For more, see Watch what you type! And four generations of a Georgia family, including a toddler, were evicted at gunpoint by dozens of sheriffs and deputies at 3am last week in an Atlanta suburb. The eyebrow-raising eviction, a foreclosure action, might have been another anonymous descent into poverty were it not for Occupy Atlanta activists who tried to help the family stay in Christine Frazer’s home of 18 years. The eviction came as Frazer, 63, who lost her husband and then job in 2009, had been challenging the foreclosure in county and federal courts by seeking to restructure the terms of a delinquent mortgage. For more, see Dozens of Police Evict Georgia Family at Gunpoint at 3am. In Canada, a revolt against a government tuition fee hike is growing into Occupy-inspired dissent against austerity and inequality. Canadian students have been furiously mobilizing for a freeze on tuition fees since last spring, when the Liberal provincial government announced hikes of 75% over five years. A general strike launched this February shuttered most of the province’s colleges and universities. In Montreal, family-friendly street-theatre and marches peaked with a historic rally of 200,000 on 22 March; business-unfriendly blockades of banks, bridges and government ministries have often paralyzed the downtown core. And over the last week, tens of thousands have joined a nightly protest ritual, marching through Montreal past the midnight hour. For more, see Quebec student protests mark “Maple spring” in Canada. And in related news, the Canadian government will support a private member’s bill that would make it a crime to wear a mask or disguise during a riot, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Sunday. The Concealment of Identity Act would create two Criminal Code offences with maximum penalties of five years in prison and fines of up to $5,000. For more, see Legislation would prohibit masks during riots. And across Canada over the past several weeks, police officers have been dressing as panhandlers and clutching cardboard signs to mimic the curbside come-ons in order to get close enough to see drivers using handheld phones while driving. “We don’t want to give panhandlers a bad name by people thinking that they’re cops,” said John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. “They are displacing people who are trying to survive by panhandling. The level of social cutbacks is such that, for panhandlers, there are no survival margins at all. And from a general decency point of view, it is a sneaky and unsavoury tactic.” For more. see No escaping hobo cop. 

Other Occupies/Protests: FREE BUS TRIP TO CHICAGO FOR NATO SUMMIT: 99% Solidarity, a Working Group of Occupy Wall Street, is excited to participate in nonviolent direct actions in Chicago from May 18 to 22, 2012. We have secured buses to bring people to these actions from several U.S cities. So far, there are buses leaving from the following cities: New York City; Washington, D.C.; Boston, MA; Providence, RI; Burlington, VT; Salem, NH; Philadelphia, PA; Atlanta, GA; Oakland, CA; Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco, CA; Portland, OR. We are currently working on the travel schedule, agenda and other important details of this trip, and we are working hard to add more cities, so please check back often if your city is not listed. We will be contacting you with updated information shortly. For now here are a few updates:

– The Bus trip is free

– 50 people from each city must sign up and board the bus for the trip take place. If a city has less then 50 sign ups, then we may have to cancel the bus for that city.

– Meals will be provided on board the bus to and from Chicago

– We are working on housing and meals while in Chicago

There are several direct actions and events that we will participate in while in Chicago including:

– May 18 – The People’s Summit

– May 19 – the 99% Solidarity People’s Convention

– May 20 – CANG8 rally and march.

Please visit 99solidarity.net often to get the most up to date information and be sure to invite your friends and fellow occupiers to join you on this exciting, historic trip.  In addition, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter: @99solidarity. http://99solidarity.net/chicago/. *Note: There’s a possibility of undercover law enforcement being present on some of these buses. Do not give information to anyone about activity you wouldn’t want everyone knowing about.

Good Morning from Occupy Boston!

Stories of the Day: The growing number of “ag gag” bills being passed state by state actually stem from “model legislation” prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These bills make it illegal for undercover investigators, concerned citizens, journalists, or anyone with a camera to capture “behind the scenes” footage of factory farms. Invested corporations are concerned that if Americans could see exactly where their food comes from and the horrors from within, we wouldn’t purchase from those companies anymore. For more, see ALEC’s Influence Over U.S. Food Policy. And ALEC has been under fire lately after the 15 major corporations and organizations pulled their support for the conservative organization, which helps quietly implement corporate-backed legislation in statehouses across the country. Now, the watchdog advocacy group group Common Cause has released a complete list of corporations on ALEC’s task forces. See a 5-minute video, ALEC Explained, for easy–to-understand information on ALEC. To see the trailer for a film project on GMOs, click here: http://www.gmofilm.com. And even before the hospital bills started coming, Lori Duff and her family were living paycheck to paycheck. So when the debt collector called and demanded $1,800 for the prenatal visits she’d had while pregnant with her third son, she panicked. The collector said the local Catholic hospital Duff had gone to could garnish 25 percent of each of her paychecks to pay off the bill. She offered to make a $20 payment—all she could afford at the time—but the collector told her the minimum was $400 down. “I was like, ‘I don’t have that. You can have everything in my account right now. It’s $1.25,'” Duff recalls. Duff was likely eligible for free care under the Mount Carmel Health System’s financial assistance policy, which offers medical care at no charge for patients earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. But the debt collector kept calling and soon informed her that the hospital was planning to sue her for the money. For more, see Sued Over An $1,800 Hospital Bill. And in positive news: Grameen Bank in Bangladesh does what most conventional banks fail to do: provide credit to the poorest people without any collateral. The underlying vision of Muhammed Yunus – founder, managing director, and Nobel laureate – is to lend to people based on their potential, rather than material possessions. For a short video, see Grameen Bank Lifts its Borrowers Out of Poverty. And check out the trailer for the film project American Autumn: An Occudoc.

Other Occupies/Protests: From W0men Occupying Wall Street (WOW): May 17, 6:30pm-9:30pm, Washington Square Park, New York City: Women Occupying Wall Street (WOW) invites people and organizations of all gender identities to the first Feminist General Assembly! Together, let’s stand for justice and disarm the war on women. It’s time to rise up! Misogyny is flagrant in our patriarchal society, not only from the politicians, but even from our comrades. It’s time for us to join, support, and empower each other by amplifying all our voices. This will be the beginning of what we hope will become an ongoing discussion throughout the nation and worldwide. Through this assembly we will create a public space for collaborating to address patriarchy, violence, and hierarchical structures that harm everyone. In the spirit of cooperation and transparency of Occupy Wall Street, we have been meeting, and continue to do so once a week, on various days of the week, and at various locations, to openly plan the event, and make participation in planning accessible to as many as possible.

Please RSVP to us at wowsnyc@gmail.com to let us know if you’d also like to take part in planning with us. And of course, feel free to please pass this along!

Find us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/WOWSNYC
http://www.facebook.com/events/175078435948082/?ref=ts

Follow us on Twitter: @wowsnyc

On Tumblr:
http://wowsnyc.tumblr.com/

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Gloria Steinem