Occupy Wall Street to target shareholder meetings

23 04 2012

Phoenix Business Journal by Kent Hoover, Washington Bureau Chief

Date: Monday, April 23, 2012, 6:59am MST

 

Corporate America, get ready: The folks who brought you Occupy Wall Street last year may confront you at your next shareholder meeting.

Activists with The 99% Spring coalition already have disrupted shareholder meetings this year at EQT Corp. (EQT), Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) and BNY Mellon (BK). Now they’ve announced a full schedule of “non-violent direct action” at shareholder meetings, starting next week with Wells Fargo and General Electric.

The coalition, which is composed of groups ranging from MoveOn.org to the Service Employees International Union, plans to block entry to the Wells Fargo (WFC) annual shareholder meeting in San Francisco April 24. What’s their beef with Wells Fargo? They want the bank to stop foreclosing on homeowners and pay more taxes — the bank’s effective tax rate has been low in recent years because of losses at its Wachovia acquisition.

Leni Juca, owner of Oxium Copy and Print in New York City, will travel to San Francisco to protest Wells Fargo’s investments in the GEO Group Inc., a private-sector company that operates the Queens Private Correctional Facility in New York.

“When I learned how Wells Fargo received $43 billion of taxpayer money in the bank bailout a few years ago and then invested in for-profit immigrant detention centers infamous across the country for substandard conditions and the pain they cause our families, I had to take action,” Juca said.

His message to Wells Fargo: “Stop investing in private prisons; start investing in small businesses.”

Maybe Juca isn’t aware that Wells Fargo takes pride in being the nation’s top lender to small businesses.

For Wells Fargo and other companies targeted by anti-corporate activists, the demonstrations will be a hassle and a public relations challenge. But they also will be an opportunity to tell their story, and explain their business practices.

For The 99% Spring, the demonstrations will be an opportunity to, in its words, “confront CEOs and other members of the 1% over their economic concerns.”

On May 1, protesters will hit three shareholder meetings: the Hershey Co. (HSY) in Hershey, Pa.; Great Plains Energy (GXY) in Kansas City; and Peabody Coal (BTU) in St. Louis.

The Bank of America (BAC), Wellpoint (WLP), Pepco (POM), Amazon (AMXN), NextEra Energy (NEE), Comcast (CMCSA) and Walmart (WMT) also are on their hit list.

One of their gripes against Wellpoint has to do with money that health insurers gave to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for use in opposing health care reform in 2010. The chamber also spent a lot of money on political races that year, mostly supporting Republicans. Its refusal to reveal its donors sparked an uproar — even PresidentBarack Obama weighed in, calling the chamber’s political activity “a threat to democracy.”

Today, the chamber was the scene of yet another protest. Union members and relatives of workers who died from job-related injuries or illnesses marched in front of the chamber. Why pick on the chamber? Because it’s spearheading the anti-regulatory movement in Washington, which has kept the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from protecting workers like it should, said Walter Jones, who chairs the American Public Health Association’s occupational safety and health section.

Fewer workers would be killed, maimed or sickened “if the chamber would lighten up a bit,” Jones said.

The chamber denies that it’s anti-regulation. It just wants agencies like OSHA to consider the costs, as well as the benefits, of its regulations, and adopt rules that are reasonable. It doesn’t apologize for being the business community’s most powerful advocate in Washington, and seems to take price when it’s singled out for protests.

 

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/morning_call/2012/04/occupy-wall-street-to-target.html

 

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Evicted From Park, Occupy Protesters Take to Sidewalks

15 04 2012

 

By 

The protesters arrived on Wall Street on Wednesday night carrying bedrolls, quilts and blankets. They spread pieces of cardboard on the sidewalks. Then, as several police officers stood nearby, the protesters made signs with anticorporate slogans.

“It’s really exciting to see people actually occupying Wall Street,” said Embi Weitzel, 25, a nanny from Colorado, who came with earplugs, apples, a flashlight, a bottle of water and an orange sleeping bag. “Finally, here we are, in the belly of the beast.”

For the third consecutive night, Occupy Wall Street protesters used a tactic that many of them hope will emerge as a replacement for their encampment at Zuccotti Park, which was disbanded by the police in November.

Norman Siegel, a prominent civil-rights lawyer who visited the protesters on Wednesday night, said a decision by a federal court in Manhattan arising from a lawsuit in 2000 allowed the protesters to sleep on sidewalks as a form of political expression so long as they did not block doorways and took up no more than half the sidewalk.

The protesters first cited that ruling last week while sleeping outside bank branches near Union Square, but said this week that they wanted so-called sleep-outs to occur nightly around the New York Stock Exchange.

An organizer, Austin Guest, said protesters had scheduled such events for Friday night at four other spots, each related to the Occupy Wall Street message that the financial system benefits the rich and corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.

The protesters’ presence on and near Wall Street has drawn the attention of the police, but officers have not dislodged them.

Dozens of Occupy encampments around the country were forcibly cleared months ago by police forces, and organizers in New York have acknowledged that it would be difficult to mount a new occupation of a park or plaza. Instead, many of them said, they would rather establish these sleeping spots.

“It takes a tremendous amount of resources to maintain a camp,” Mr. Guest said Wednesday night. “But sidewalks are everywhere.”

Another organizer, Jo Robin, said that by moving to Wall Street, the protesters hoped to address a new audience that would most likely not support the movement’s message. She added that over the past week, protesters in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington had begun sleeping near financial institutions.

About 75 protesters gathered on Wednesday night in Lower Manhattan. About 15 slept on Wall Street. Most of them stretched out on Nassau Street, just north of Wall Street. Others unrolled their sleeping bags on Broad Street, across from the illuminated colonnade of the stock exchange.

“The conversations that were happening in Zuccotti Park are happening again,” said Ray Leone, 26, from the Lower East Side. “We were separated for so long.”

Around 2 a.m. on Thursday, several protesters kicked a soccer ball across the cobblestones of Nassau Street. A large dump truck lifted a metal container with a clang and emptied its contents.

A couple of hours later, most protesters were asleep, curled under blankets, some wearing hats and scarves.

Nearby, in Zuccotti Park, empty except for a security guard, there was the hiss of sprinklers watering tulips.

By 5:30 a.m., the sound of stainless-steel coffee carts clattering over cobblestones could be heard. Workers began hosing the sidewalk across the street from Federal Hall. By 6 a.m., protesters were waking up.

As the sky brightened, workers in suits or high heels began walking down Wall Street, and a young protester offered them pamphlets.

Many ignored the literature. Some accepted, leafing through the pamphlet as they walked or shoving it into their pockets as they hurried to their jobs.

 

 

 

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Occupy Our Homes: The Next Stage of the Occupy Movement

14 04 2012

By Peter Dreier

Posted: 12/06/11 11:05 AM ET

Criticized for focusing more on what it is against than what it is for, the Occupy Wall Street movement has now found an organizing issue it can embrace. Perhaps because so many Occupiers have recently been evicted from their encampments in cities across the country, they have found common cause with the growing number of American families facing foreclosure. Last week, after the Los Angeles Police Department evicted Occupy LA from the park outside City Hall, Mario Brito, one of the group’s lead organizers, said that the movement’s activists would begin to set up occupations at the homes and country clubs of major bank executives reside and to work with other groups to protest the growing wave of foreclosures.

More and more homeowners facing wrongful foreclosure evictions are taking a bold stand by resisting banks’ unfair actions. They are deciding to stay in their homes and fight. When the banks or sheriffs come knocking on their doors, they are saying “we’re not leaving.”

One of the leaders of the “Occupy Our Homes” campaign is Rose Gudiel, who last month, with the help of community and union activists, successfully battled OneWest Bank and Fannie Mae to keep her home after they ordered her evicted from her home in La Puente, a working class suburb of Los Angeles. Inspired by Gudiel’s gritty example, other homeowners are taking action. Today, two other families in the Los Angeles area will be linking arms with friends and neighbors to resist eviction from foreclosure.

Ana Casas Wilson grew up in the same house her family has owned since 1975 in South Gate, another working class suburb of Los Angeles. She now lives there with her husband James, a school custodian, her mother, a home health care worker, and her 17-year-old son. Ana, who has cerebral palsy, has been an advocate for the disabled and is active in several local community and service groups.

In 1990, Ana took over the home from her family and refinanced in order to make extensive repairs. Eventually, their loan was sold to Wells Fargo. In 2009, Ana was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, forcing James to quit his job as a security guard in order to help take care of her. Ana has now recovered after a double mastectomy and the family now has three stable incomes in the household. They have long been able to make payments — but the bank stopped accepting them. Ana and her supporters got the bank to temporarily hold off enforcing the eviction order. But Wells Fargo has refused to reconsider the Wilsons for a loan modification, even though they likely qualify based on their current income.

Art D., his wife, and with their four children, ages 11, 10, 8, and 7, moved into their modest three-bedroom Inland Empire home, east of Los Angeles in 2003. (The family asked that its last name not be revealed until today.) It was their first home and represented the American dream they had worked their whole lives for. Art has worked for over 21 years as a supervisor at a metal finishing company which makes parts for the aerospace industry, and before that he served five years in the Marine Corps.

In 2009, due to the economic crisis, Art was working fewer hours, making it harder for him to make his monthly mortgage payments. He applied for a loan modification with his bank, JP Morgan Chase, and was given temporarily lowered payments. After he made four payments, Chase notified Arturo that they were rejecting him for a permanent modification, they wouldn’t accept further payments, and they would be foreclosing on his home, even after he provided the bank with paperwork showing that his income had recovered to its previous level. In November 2010, the house was sold at public auction and in June the family was evicted from their home. Although Art and his family have relocated to an apartment in Orange County, they are determined to get their home back from the bank that took it from them unjustly.

Ana, Art and their families have decided to take the courageous step of reclaiming their homes. Joined by supporters, they will take direct action today to challenge Wall Street profiteering that has created a housing crisis for millions of families.

Actions will include “reclaiming” houses that banks are leaving vacant and “home defense” to stop banks from foreclosing and profiting further from the economic crash they created.

The protest at the Wilson home will take place at 12:30 p.m. at 8968 San Juan Avenue in South Gate. At 3 pm, protesters will meet at the parking lot at Ralph’s grocery store at 3350 La Sierra Avenue in Riverside, before moving to Art D.’s home. (Contact ACCE organizer Peter Kuhns at (213) 272-1141 for more information).

Homeowners in other cities — including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon — will be taking similar actions.

The “Occupy Our Homes” campaign is led by a coalition of community groups, unions, and faith-based organizations. In California, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and ReFund California has taken the lead in mobilizing public outrage at banks’ irresponsible actions. They are part of a national network of organizations that includes the New Bottom Line, New York Communities for Change; Take Back the Land, and SOUL (in Chicago). In Los Angeles and elsewhere, Occupy Wall Street activists have jumped on this bandwagon to channel their anger against the financial industry and its grip on our political system.

The current economic tsunami was caused by the greedy and short-sighted practices of the major Wall Street banks. Taxpayers gave Wall Street banks a $700 billion bail-out through the federal TARP plan, and another $7.7 trillion in nearly interest-free loans of taxpayer money through the Federal Reserve. Bank profits in the third quarter of 2011 were more than $35 billion — higher than they were before the crash. According to the analysis of the “Occupy Our Homes” campaign:

    • Banks created a housing bubble, deliberately designing predatory loans with balloon payments, variable rates, and other features that would yield short-term profits while preying on families least able to pay.
    • Banks knew that many of these loans could not be repaid, but they didn’t care because they planned to package and re-sell the mortgages to investors who then were left holding the bag.
    • The economy crashed as a result of this bank-created house of cards, putting tens of millions of Americans out of work. Unemployment is overwhelmingly the primary cause of foreclosures.
    • More than 6 million Americans have lost their homes, often through illegal foreclosures, and another 5 million are at risk. Many homeowners were told that if they stopped making payments, they could qualify for a lower rate. When they did so, the banks put them in default and initiated foreclosure.
    • The banks still claim that they should be able to collect mortgage payments based on the value of homes before the crash they caused, rather than current value. At least one in four homeowners is now “underwater” — meaning the bank wants them to make payments on a higher mortgage than what the house is worth.
    • Wall Street is draining hundreds of billions of dollars from communities by demanding artificially inflated mortgage payments — money that is needed to support local jobs and small businesses and get the economy working again for the 99%.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/occupy-our-homes-the-next_b_1131551.html

 

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Less Visible Occupy Movement Looks for Staying Power

2 04 2012

WASHINGTON — Six months after the Occupy movement first used protests and encampments to turn the nation’s attention to economic inequality, the movement needs to find new ways to gain attention or it will most likely fade to the edges of the political discourse, according to supporters and critics.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Occupy activists gathered in Northampton, Mass., during a stop on a bus tour this year.

“They have fewer people, and it’s not a new story anymore that there were people protesting in the streets or sleeping in parks,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal organization that has strong ties to top Democrats and has encouraged the protests. “They need to think of new ways to garner attention and connect with people around the country.”

Driven off the streets by local law enforcement officials, who have evicted protesters from their encampments and arrested thousands, the movement has seen a steep decline in visibility. That has left Occupy without bases of operations in the heart of many cities and has forced protesters to spend time defending themselves in court, deterring many from taking to the streets again.

In Oakland, Calif., which at one point last year appeared to be one of Occupy’s strongholds, activists have had less than a handful of marches this year and no longer have any encampments in the city, according to a police official there. In New York, where the police evicted protesters from Zuccotti Park in November, the few protests in the past few weeks have been smaller than the ones last year, the police said.

With less visibility, the movement has received less attention from the news media, taking away a national platform.

Occupy does not have a traditional leadership structure, making it difficult for the movement to engage in conventional political organizing in support of state legislators and members of Congress, like the Tea Party has. And some activists, angry at politicians across the board, do not see electoral politics as the best avenue for the movement, complicating efforts to chart its direction.

Occupy activists acknowledge that building and maintaining a populist movement is daunting and that the clashes over the right to protest have drained some energy.

Bill Csapo, a 58-year-old member of Occupy Wall Street, the New York branch of the movement, answered the phone number listed on its Web site and offered his take on the group’s standing.

“Are we a little scarred? Of course,” he said.

He added: “The people who were driven out of Zuccotti Park in November haven’t gone anywhere and are still working. All the original committed people are still here. This is not a game — we are trying to save our civilization.”

Brian Grimes, a member of the movement who has been spending his days at McPherson Square in Washington, where the police still allow sit-ins and tents, acknowledged that the group needed to adapt its tactics to remain relevant.

“Like you’ll find in anything, you can’t stick to the same thing,” said Mr. Grimes, 35, of Montgomery County, Md. “Whether it’s education, health care or protests, you cannot be static, and you have to change your tactics.”

Mr. Grimes said that new ways of gaining attention could come in the form of flash mobs or banner drops from buildings, like the ones used by protesters in Europe.

“We need to keep them guessing,” he said, referring to the news media and the police.

The movement’s staying power will depend on the success of several events planned for the coming weeks. Despite recent actions that have fizzled, including an Occupy Corporations day in February, organizers are planning a strike and demonstrations on May 1, International Labor Day. But the response has been mixed, and activists now say that Americans could show sympathy for the cause in other ways, like not shopping that day.

Chris Longenecker, 24, a member of the group who is helping to organize the strike and protests in May, said the lull in attention over the past few months was due to the group’s focus on building up capacity for larger events.

“We are looking to late spring and summer,” he said. “We are reconnecting with our passive supporters who saw us lay more dormant in the winter. We have spent the vast majority of the winter laying roots across community organizations and labor andimmigration.”

Whether Occupy has a resurgence, it has already had a significant influence on American politics, making economic inequality — and specifically the top “1 percent” — a major issue in the national dialogue.

In December, 48 percent of Americans said they agreed with the concerns raised by Occupy, although only 29 percent approved of the way the protests were being conducted,according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

After that poll, Pew stopped surveying specifically about the movement. “The movement was not in the news as much coming into 2012, and the nation’s focus and our polling turned to the Republican primary,” said Michael Dimock, an associate director of research at Pew.

News coverage of Occupy has fallen off significantly since late last year, according to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In October, coverage of Occupy made up 6 percent of the news generated by news organizations in the United States. That number climbed to 14 percent in the middle of November and then slid to 1 percent in December. The number remained below 1 percent in January and February and has been so small this month that the Project for Excellence in Journalism said it was equivalent to no coverage.

Although the coverage has fallen off, concerns about economic opportunity and equality are at the highest levels since the mid-1990s.

In a poll released by Pew on March 2, 19 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside of our control,” the highest number since 1994.

What is more, 40 percent of Americans — also the highest number since 1994 — agreed with the statement that “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.”

Ms. Tanden, of the Center for American Progress, said that even if the Occupy movement did not regain significant visibility, it would continue to have an impact on the presidential election, having forced even Republicans to begin talking about inequality.

“It wasn’t Democrats who said that Mitt Romney was a ‘vulture capitalist,’ it was Rick Perry,” she said, referring to the Texas governor and former Republican presidential candidate.

Erik Eckholm contributed reporting from New York.

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/for-occupy-movement-a-challenge-to-recapture-momentum.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse
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Arrests at Occupy Wall Street Rally

26 03 2012

The police arrested several people on Saturday during an Occupy Wall Streetmarch that organizers said was meant to protest police tactics and brutality. In part, protesters said, the march was meant to object to the police decision last Saturday to close Zuccotti Park and arrest more than 70 people gathered there.

The first arrests took place shortly after about 300 people left Zuccotti Park and began marching north, accompanied by police on foot and riding scooters. On White Street, many of the marchers abruptly turned onto Lafayette Street, breaking away from the attending officers, and running north. Some of them unfurled yellow flags and others a long orange net resembling nets the police have used in the past to corral protesters.

At Canal Street a police commander grabbed a young woman holding the net.

“You’re under arrest,” he said to the woman and then pointed to another woman nearby, saying that she too was under arrest. Officers and protesters surrounded the women as they lay on the pavement with the netting draped over them. They were then taken into custody.

Over the next hour or so, the march continued, passing through the financial district and SoHo, with some protesters shouting invective at the officers and occasionally doubling back on sidewalks in an apparent effort to shake the large police detail following them.

At times the marchers flooded into streets. For a while they stood in an intersection at Spring Street and Mulberry Street, and one person in the crowd fired a confetti gun into the air with a muffled boom, sending multicolored particles of papers floating slowly onto the street.

Police commanders made announcements directing people to the sidewalk, and officers grabbed two men out of the crowd and ordered them to stand next to a police van.

“I was walking across the street,” one of the two, Armin Radoncic, said.

As the marchers moved north on Mott Street, officers entered the crowd on the sidewalk at three different times and made arrests.

One of those arrests involved a young woman who briefly blocked a police scooter from passing down the street. After an exchange with the officer on the scooter, she moved out of the way but was arrested as she stepped on the sidewalk. As in the other arrests, a throng quickly formed, with protesters, onlookers and photographers crowding around and police officers pushing some of them back.

A few feet away a man lay on the sidewalk, shouting that his leg had been injured.

Finally, the marchers made it to Union Square, where protesters have assembled nightly for the past week and police officers have begun using metal barricades to cordon off the park’s southern plaza at midnight.

Inside the park, the protesters beat drums, held meetings and displayed a banner reading “Union Square Park Occupied.” Some of them also pointed to a sign that they said had been affixed to a pole at the park on Thursday by parks department workers and which listed several forms of prohibited behavior.

Gambling and disorderly conduct were forbidden along with “rallying,” the sign said, “except by permit.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 25, 2012

An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly referred to the location at which protesters stopped for a time as the intersection of Spring Street and Mott Street. The post also incorrectly referred to the location at which officers entered the crowd to make arrests as Mulberry Street.

 

 

 

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