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%.

There have been several high profile events related to Wikileaks, Anonymous and other groups that have use technology as a medium for protest.  However, their disruptive impact has led them to be labeled by some officials and media sources as criminals or terrorist.  In in Foreign Affairs web feature `Hacks of Valor‘, Yochai Benkler makes the case for the actions of Anonymous as `unpleasant pranksterism to nasty hooliganism’, but not `vast criminal or cyberterrorist conspiracy’.  Agree or disagree, it’s definitely an interesting article, and if you’re allowed to talk politics at the dinner table, may make for a lively Easter or Passover discussion!

PACs (Political Action Committees), which control most of the corporate lobbying funds, have spend 4X more on the 2012 election then when compared to similar types of groups in the 2008 election.

Article from the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

Find out more about PACS and who is donating: http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/

[iframe width=”500px” title=”Comparison to Date” height=”425px” src=”https://data.sunlightlabs.com/w/hfnu-pptd/38mm-etse?cur=umrvoWxsuhT&from=zuTlyaxj9iK” frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”>Comparison to Date]

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.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/arrests-at-occupy-wall-street-rally/?ref=occupywallstreet

This is a recent article from New York Times about Occupy Wall Street.

In September they began to gather, their encampment growing by the week. The police, confronted with a populist movement that put down roots in the financial district, were unsure of how to respond to Occupy Wall Street. At some marches, protesters were arrested for veering off the sidewalk into the street; at others, the police ordered protesters off the sidewalk.

Tents were banned early on, then tolerated, then banned again. The mayor said he was going to clear the encampment in October to clean up Zuccotti Park, then balked before finally going through with it a month later, when he sent the police in to clear the camp, in the middle of the night, with little warning.

Now, with Occupy Wall Street’s resurgence, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s response to the protest movement has not been ambivalent. Asked at a news conference on Monday if he had a strategy to prevent large-scale arrests of protesters, Mr. Bloomberg said: “You want to get arrested? We’ll accommodate you.”

While saying that the protests make for “great theater,” he dismissed them as ineffective. “If you have something, really, to say, that would be a great contribution, nobody can hear you when everybody’s yelling and screaming and pushing and shoving,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

On Saturday, the first major conflict between the Occupy Wall Street movement and theNew York Police Department since Jan. 1 took place, with the police arresting 76 protesters. Many of those happened after the police declared the park closed on Saturday night, and ordered everyone out.

On Monday, City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez said he was going to ask the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, to hold hearings to review the police actions. He said he also believed that the Police Department was “using brutal excessive force against peaceful people” during some of the arrests.

Another councilman, Jumaane Williams, questioned whether the police had the authority to close the park on Saturday night, an act that led to many of the arrests. A law enforcement official said the Police Department had decided to declare the park closed because of concerns about vandalism. The official said several electrical outlets at the park had been damaged, though on Saturday night the police told protesters that the park was being cleared so that it could be cleaned.

While most of the arrests were for misdemeanors, three people were charged with felonies: a 23-year old Wisconsin woman accused of elbowing a police officer in the face; a man accused of trying to snatch a gun and a radio from a police sergeant; and a 25-year-old California man accused of pushing an officer, the police said.

On Monday afternoon, a dozen uniformed officers ringed the park in groups of three and four, watching as a smattering of protesters and tourists mingled. One officer said he was not even aware that there had been any arrests over the weekend. There was little indication that the officers on duty — who were detailed to the park from precincts in the Rockaways, the East Village and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn — had received new instructions differing from those in effect last fall.

One officer said that as far as he knew there was only one special rule that the police were enforcing. “Right now, the only rule is you can’t stay overnight,” he said, adding, “No tents, and no tarps or sleeping bags.”

The officer said that beyond that, the police were there just to ensure that there were no fights and to respond to crime. He gestured at a nearby protester, 38-year-old Justin Stone-Diaz, who was at that moment yelling, “Off the buses and into the park!” at a passing bus.

“That guy there — the one yelling — he’s all right,” the officer said. “He’s not bothering anyone.”

A police spokeswoman, Deputy Inspector Kim Y. Royster, said police operations at Zuccotti Park were “assessed daily.”

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/nyregion/with-return-of-wall-street-protesters-mayor-no-longer-seems-ambivalent.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse

This article talks about some inequalities related to the income gap.

“From 1993 to 2010, the incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans grew 58 percent while the rest had a 6.4 percent bump. There is little reason to think the trend will go into reverse any time soon, given globalization and technological change, which have weighed heavily on the wages of less educated workers who compete against machines and cheap foreign labor while increasing the returns of top executives and financiers.

The income gap narrowed briefly during the Great Recession, as plummeting stock prices shrunk the portfolios of the rich. But in 2010, the first year of recovery, the top 1 percent of Americans captured 93 percent of the income gains.”

“A big income gap is likely to open up other social breaches that make it tougher for those lower down the rungs to get ahead. And that is exactly what appears to be happening in the United States, where a narrow elite is peeling off from the rest of society by a chasm of wealth, power and experience.”

“One doesn’t have to believe in equality to be concerned about these trends. Once inequality becomes very acute, it breeds resentment and political instability, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. It can produce political polarization and gridlock, splitting the political system between haves and have-nots, making it more difficult for governments to address imbalances and respond to brewing crises. That too can undermine economic growth, let alone democracy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/business/economy/tolerance-for-income-gap-may-be-ebbing-economic-scene.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse

Many people form the 99% group feel that they just have enough money for a living. However, the top 1% are no different either. Many bankers experienced a reduce bonus for 2011 and they feel that they are trapped financially too. The amount of money they are bringing in is not enough for them to keep up with their current lifestyle.

“Schiff, (director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc.) 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.”

“M. Todd Henderson, a University of Chicago law professor who’s teaching a seminar on executive compensation, said the suffering is relative and real. He wrote two years ago that his family was “just getting by” on more than $250,000 a year, setting off what he called a firestorm of criticism.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/wall-street-bonus-withdrawal-means-trading-aspen-for-cheap-chex.html

To The Diseent/ Rebellion group:

Do the last few paragraphs on teh second page give you any ideas?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/kristof-after-recess-change-the-world.html

Freedom to Occupy? Reclaiming Space and Reinventing Protest

The Occupy Movement, originating at Wall Street, but spreading rapidly across the country and the globe, represents an important moment in the history of political protest.  It captured public imagination and shifted the terrain of political discourse. This panel brings together scholars and activists to discuss the strategies of the Occupy Movement to reclaim space, interrogate contemporary economic policy, rally the “99%” and rethink the meaning of democracy. The speakers will examine how the Occupy Movement may or may not be a lens to explore freedom as a democratic, anti-capitalist, nonhierarchical, feminist, and anti-racist practice. With Radhika Balakrishnan, Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers; Helena Ribeiro, English, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and Ken Wark, Culture and Media, The New School. Moderated by Moustafa Bayoumi, English, Brooklyn College.

Feb 27, 2012, 6:00pm | The Skylight Room (9100)

Bring student ID