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    • The OB Media Rundown for 2/14/12

    February 14th, 2012 · · Daily Media Rundown Comments Off on The OB Media Rundown for 2/14/12
    Confirmed: 50-state mortgage settlement is a “broad release” – Lawless conduct against mortgage holders tacitly ratified

    [Executive summary] “The proposed Release contains a broad release of the banks’ conduct related to mortgage loan servicing, foreclosure preparation, and mortgage loan origination services. Claims based on these areas of past conduct by the banks cannot be brought by state attorneys general or banking regulators.”

    http://tinyurl.com/6wt6jp7

    Occupy Harvard Occupies Lamont Library

    The group plans to hold study breaks, film screenings, knowledge shares, and facilitated discussions about many issues including access to higher education, the ongoing privatization of the university, and Harvard’s role in facilitating neo-liberalism worldwide. Topics for upcoming discussions include: “The role of knowledge in promoting social equality and social justice,” and “What is a library? What does the library of the future look like?” The group intends to maintain a presence in the cafe until 10:00pm on Friday February 17th.

    The Occupation of the Library coincides with a larger campus debate about plans for restructuring the Harvard library system. In a letter sent to the Harvard community last week, President Drew Faust wrote, “We are moving into an exciting yet uncharted new world of digital information in which experiments and innovations are constant and necessary, yet their outcomes not always predictable.”

    Such vague statements from the administration about restructuring the library have provoked serious concerns about the human and academic cost.

    http://tinyurl.com/8ygb8ks

    Harvard Occupiers Protest Library Staff Cuts

    Shortly after 11 A.M. Monday, the Lamont Occupiers were informed by a library administrator that their signs-which they regard as protected speech-violated a policy against the hanging of signs in library buildings. They were told that although the policy is unwritten, it is widely known. Members of the Harvard University Police department then removed the signs as the Occupiers videotaped the event.

    http://tinyurl.com/83k6b48

    Banking Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This

    The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers.

    The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement.

    http://tinyurl.com/7not24r

    Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/14/12” »

    The OB Media Rundown for 2/13/12

    February 13th, 2012 · · Daily Media Rundown One comment

    Conversation with Occupy the “T” Activists

    Activists with #OccupyBoston and associated groups in surrounding cities and towns served by the MBTA transit system are mobilizing their supporters to oppose extensive cuts in services and large fare increases on the trains and buses of the “T.”

    On Sunday, members of Occupy the T joined the hosts of “RADIO with a VIEW” on WMBR-FM in Cambridge to discuss the consequences of fare hikes and service cuts and the reaction from Occupy activists and their allies.

    http://tinyurl.com/7x7ebsp

    Students Occupy Lamont Library Café

    Members of the Occupy Harvard movement parked themselves in Lamont Library Café on Sunday night, pledging to stay in the café until 10 p.m. on Friday in order to protest planned staff reductions in Harvard libraries.

    More than 23 supporters of the movement gathered in the café to inaugurate the next phase of their protest, the first to involve a physical occupation since Harvard administrators removed the Occupy Harvard dome from the Yard on Jan. 13.

    http://tinyurl.com/7oe9rml

    Occupy Movement and Libertarians, Tea Partiers Find Common Cause in Fight Against NDAA

    A coalition of three Southern Oregon Occupy Movements is joining forces with a local libertarian/Tea Party goup called Wake Up America Southern Oregon for a Monday February 13th protest in Medford against the National Defense Authorization Act. This is one of the first cooperative efforts between such groups. A statement noted that the joint action will “show that united we can begin to stand up to the problems which face us as a nation and a people.”

    http://tinyurl.com/7b6o3re

    Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/13/12” »

    Harvard is Re-Occupied!

    February 12th, 2012 · · Events, News and Announcements One comment

    Occupy Harvard's occupation of Lamont LibraryThe following communiqué comes from our sisters and brothers at Occupy Harvard. Today they began a one-week, 24-hour occupation of Lamont Café—part of Harvard University’s Lamont Library, which is located in Harvard Yard. You can read the original post here. For more information, check out Occupy Harvard’s press release. Finally, you can support Occupy Harvard by making a donation. Solidarity!

    Harvard’s Lamont Library is Occupied

    Dear Friends and Community Members,

    Lamont Café is occupied.

    We intend for it to remain occupied until Friday at 10 pm.

    At a time when Harvard University is restructuring the library, we are working to change what a library is understood to be. Take a break. Think. The New Harvard Library Working Group of Occupy Harvard has opened a persistent community space for critical thought, engaged learning, and insistent action in the Lamont Library Café.

    We invite you to join us as we engage in communal tasks of producing knowledge (skill-shares, tutoring, and, yes, we will read your paper drafts), meet for morning coffee and conversation, and host twice-daily “Think Tanks”—topical discussions in which participants enter as equals and where professors, students, and workers converse as peers. Our current schedule is included below, but check-in frequently as new events and opportunities will be taking shape as the days progress.

    Why now? Why Lamont? The Harvard Library transition is a simulacrum of the University’s accession to neoliberal imperatives. Occupy, whether at Harvard or Wall Street, challenges and refuses the devastating willingness of our broken society to view humans as expendable resources and systems as ultimately beholden to profit. A library needs the workers who are its lifeblood, just as a functioning democratic society needs the voices of the 99%. The proposed library transition not only fails to address these systemic problems, it replicates them—both in terms of business practice and the production of scholarship and knowledge.

    As members of the Harvard community, we are committed to occupying the spaces of our education with integrity and intentionality. Lamont Library Café is an educational space specifically vested to facilitate the learning ideals of the University. We are doing no more and no less than striving to fulfill the promise of this space.

    Thank you for your engagement, your solidarity, and your support as we live into the possibilities of a new Harvard Library together.

    Take a break. Think.

    New Harvard Library Working Group
    Occupy Harvard

    For the schedule of events at occupied Lamont Library, click here.

    April 1st GA Will Be at Dewey Square

    February 12th, 2012 · · Passed Resolutions Comments Off on April 1st GA Will Be at Dewey Square

    The following proposal passed the General Assembly of Occupy Boston on February 9, 2012:

    To have a GA on April 1st at 5:30 PM in Dewey Square in place of the Action Assembly.

    The OB Media Rundown for 2/12/12

    February 12th, 2012 · · Daily Media Rundown Comments Off on The OB Media Rundown for 2/12/12

    Occupy Kindergarten: The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Education

    Economic class is increasingly becoming the great dividing line of American education.

    The New York Times has published a roundup of recent research showing the growing academic achievement gap between rich and poor students. It prominently features a paper by Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon, which found that, since the 1960s, the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40%, and is now double gap between black and white students.

    The children of the wealthy are pulling away from their lower-class peers — the same way their parents are pulling away from their peers’ parents. When it comes to college completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50% since the 1980s. Upper income families are also spending vastly more on their children compared to the poor than they did 40 years ago, and spending more time as parents cultivating their intellectual development.

    http://tinyurl.com/7mapmeo

    The Power of the Occupy Movement

    You may question the power of the Occupy movement, but think back less than a year ago. The Tea Party was setting the agenda: the federal deficit and national debt were preeminent issues, President Obama was anxious to trim Social Security, Medicare and other essential social services in order to get any kind of  deal with the newly powerful and recalcitrant GOP leadership. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner had this president by the short hairs, and Barack Obama seemed eager to cut any deal he could. Millionaires and billionaires didn’t need to worry about losing their tax breaks.

    Fast forward to September of last year. Occupy Wall Street goes to the heart of the financial industry, and within weeks the focus of political discussion had changed to the corruption without accountability of Big Banks, and the wide gap in wealth between the One Percent and the 99%. Issues of class and economic fairness that had been swept under the rug for years suddenly became issues for discussion. Middle class Americans began to understand that corporations and the wealthy were paying a lower tax rate than they were.

    http://tinyurl.com/888bdjp

    Across U.S., Occupy movement preparing for its next phase

    The Occupy Wall Street encampments that sprang up in scores of cities last fall, thrusting “We are the 99 percent” into the vernacular, have largely been dismantled, with a new wave of crackdowns and evictions. Since clashes last month in Oakland, Calif., headlines have dwindled, too.

    Far from dissipating, groups around the country say they are preparing for a new phase of larger marches and strikes this spring that they hope will rebuild momentum and cast an even brighter glare on inequality and corporate greed. But without the visible camps or clear goals, can Occupy become a lasting force for change? Will disruptive protests do more to galvanize or alienate the public?

    Though still loosely organized, the movement is putting down roots in many cities. Activists in Chicago and Des Moines, Iowa, have rented offices, a significant change for groups accustomed to holding open-air assemblies or huddling in tents in bad weather.

    http://tinyurl.com/7clfngu

    Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/12/12” »

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