Thousands upon thousands of public sector jobs have disappeared. Half of Greece’s hospitals are slated to close. We met doctors who had not received their pay in over 6 months. Free access to healthcare is being replaced by free market chaos in which people must rely on bribes and brokers in order to even secure basic services.  The old social contract of the European welfare state has come to an end.

Factories are closing shop and moving to other countries where production is more profitable. Uncounted numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe, South Asia, and North Africa who came to Greece seeking papers to enter the European Union now find themselves stuck in a society where the jobs have disappeared – and where swaggering neo-Nazis are mobilized to attack them on the street.

Public agricultural lands that once provided for the people are being privatized. With those privatizations, agriculture is being replaced with whatever industries are profitable to foreign imperialist powers. Greece is entering a process of neo-liberal specialization, in which its economy is to be warped and disfigured to produce whatever is profitable for global capitalism.

These measures have been met with wave after wave of rebellion. Millions are saying no to this trajectory. Institutions, arrangements and assumptions that once appeared permanent and unquestionable have been thrown into the air. The country is in such profound crises that many sense revolutionary potential. Communism is re-emerging as a name of an emancipatory possibility and road that people can take. Perhaps instead of breakdown, the people will breakthrough.Today, an electoral crisis and the emergence of the radical left have come to characterize Greece in the minds of many people. This is actually the most recent of four moments of intense radicalization in Greek society.

2008: Greece on fire

December of 2008 was a winter that forever changed Greece, setting it on fire. The global financial crisis was the kindling, but the match was actually the murder of a young boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, by the police. What started as demonstrations and riots in the small sub-cultural community of Exarcheia quickly spread to become a national rebellion. The legitimacy of Greece’s ruling parties was called into question for the first time in decades. The left was polarized, with the anarchists and the more creative sections of the communist movement playing a very important role.  Meanwhile, forces that claimed to be on the side of the people, such as the old Communist Party of Greece (KKE), found themselves exposed and isolated. This KKE declared that (in their minds) any “genuine popular revolt will not smash even a single pane of glass.”

The rebellion among Greek people reverberated and grew. In response to loan and austerity programs being imposed on Greece by the European Union, 2010 became a year of mass protests and general strikes with crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. General strikes occurred in industries where labor unions had historically been dominated by the PASOK, a mainstream party that postures as social-democratic as it carries out austerity, and that has played a role of co-option for decades in Greece. The political forces of Greek society were realigning.

One year later, on the anniversary of these strikes, Greece’s equivalent of the Arab Spring (and of our own Occupy movement) emerged suddenly and unexpectedly. This “Movement of the Squares” was organized on Facebook by students with no previous political experiences. “People’s assemblies” were called, declaring themselves to be the real democracy of the people, and challenging the legitimacy and rule of the PASOK dominated government.

These demonstrations are one manifestation of a rupture happening within Greek society. For decades, the country had been dominated by two neo-liberal political parties, one that pretends to be on the side of the people, and another that does not even pretend. Greece’s historical legacy of armed guerilla war led by communists against a Nazi occupation had been reduced to World War II nostalgia, represented by the KKE and its aging “voters for life.” Suddenly, all of this was ripped apart. What people believed was possible changed, and what was actually possible changed. The PASOK government came toppling down. The trade unions it bureaucratized were no longer under its control. The people were in the streets, facing extreme police repression while remaining defiant and unafraid.

The three ruling powers that dominate Greece have been called “the Troika,” alluding to the familiar image of a three-horse carriage – in this case pulled by three powerful forces at break-neck speed toward disaster. The three horses of this Troika are the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank. The global financial crisis (fueled by the Troika’s own robbery, bubbles, loans, speculation) and the toppling of the PASOK government, all led the Troika impose a special “memorandum.” That memorandum was a document demanding extreme austerity and a Greek government overseen by foreign bankers and technocrats.

The combination of a historic moment of crisis and the resulting mass movement of the Squares didn’t just lead to a rupture in the politics of the larger society, but also a rupture inside the left. Many Left political forces abstained from this mass rebellion. The anarchist movement split over whether to participate in the Squares Movement, with many arguing it wasn’t radical enough to warrant their participation. Dogmatic sections of the Left even protested against the Square, because it wasn’t a movement that fit inside their preexisting schema. A young Greek radical described it to me as follows:

“the people went to the squares”

“After all these struggles, the people went to the Squares, our ‘Occupy movement.’ KKE and ANTARSYA [two old orthodox Leftist political trends] would say, ‘You must be active.’ But when there was a major upsurge of the people, they refused to join. Yet for all of their constant activism, they produce no actual new movement or consciousness or changes in society. But the Squares movement brought profound changes in society.”

Meanwhile, participants in SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, stood out in making major contributions to the Movement of the Squares. One organization, the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), a member of SYRIZA, contributed to the development of the movement by creating key initiatives that resolved challenges the movement faced. When doctors lost their jobs because of the austerity, the KOE played a role together with others in organizing doctors to treat people for free in the occupations. The Squares became a place where migrant workers could come to be treated when the racist Troika government denied them healthcare. When the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn came to distribute Greek flags in the occupation, aiming to infuse ultra-nationalism with the Greek Squares movement, the KOE came with the flags of other countries where people are struggling against oppression, including Egypt, Tunisia, and Palestine. From the very beginning of the Squares occupations, the KOE incorporated the image of a helicopter and the slogan “GET OUT!” – making it clear that all they want from government leaders is for them to get in helicopters and flee into exile. The helicopter image has come to characterize a radical pole of the Squares movement.

As a result of all this, much of the Squares Movement has transformed the landscape of the left itself. Those political forces which were once small electoral coalitions such as the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) in particular, have become major channels of the resistance, political energy, and engagement of millions.

SYRIZA has its roots as a coalition inside of the anti-globalization movement in Greece, before becoming an electoral bloc. In other words, SYRIZA itself represents a diverse set of radical currents and alliances with inevitable disputes between them. Some forces within SYRIZA imagine a Greece liberated from foreign imperialist power and capitalist logic, and see Greece as a possible spark that spreads such liberation to the rest of Europe. They capture their ideas with the slogan “Another Greece in another Europe.” Other forces in SYRIZA imagine a series of reforms that make the European Union into a progressive force in the world. Today these diverse currents are united but that is not likely to always remain the case.

For now, the whole of SYRIZA has taken a righteous stand against the memorandum and the Troika, declaring its intention to shred the memorandum, abolish the technocratic regime, re-negotiate Greece’s position in the European Union, to refuse Greece’s participation in the wars of imperialism, and to ultimately expel all foreign military bases from Greece. It is a plan which has captured the imaginations and aspirations of millions of people. One third of Greece voted for SYRIZA, and it is said that even more support SYRIZA, but feared that Greece would isolated from the outside world by the Troika, and plunged into extreme poverty if the Radical Left were to be elected.

The plans of SYRIZA contain many contradictions and assumptions. For example, it is hard to imagine a future where this kind of program is allowed to be implemented peacefully, with Greece remaining in the Euro-zone, and without some sort of show down or confrontation. This road of radical reform was not allowed peacefully in other societies such as Chile. No doubt the different and opposing poles that exist within SYRIZA will become harder to ignore as the situation evolves.

No revolution is pre-determined or guaranteed. Without a doubt, the differing ideas, practice, and methods of the radical left will pose themselves very sharply in the future. But for now, millions in Greece have spoken: they will not go quietly as their society is crushed by ruthless austerity and global technocrats. Our brothers and sisters in Greece are in the midst of an uprising that mirrors the Occupy movement in many ways, yet at the same time it is ten steps ahead of it.  Christos, a young student and revolutionary, said to me “Your Occupy Wall Street movement is so important to us. We can see that this thing is even happening in America now.” If we are to transform this world, we’ll do it together.

A Russian man protests the persecution of Pussy Riot.

This week in Occupy, Pussy Riot was sentenced to two years in Russian prison, we expressed solidarity with General Motors hunger strikers in Colombia, activists far and nigh set their sights on Tampa and the Republican National Convention, and the one-year Occuversary is approaching.

#After a short trial, three members of Pussy Riot, an all-girl punk band who sang two minutes of an anti-Putin song in a Russian Orthodox church, were sentenced to two years in a prison colony. Read their awesome closing statement. The court responsible for sentencing them was later hacked. Occupy Wall Street massed in Times Square to protest the verdict.

#On August 1, workers of ASOTRECOL, the association of injured workers and ex-workers at the General Motors plant in Bogotá, Colombia, launched a hunger strike. Some workers sewed their mouths shut in protest.

#Machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike for higher wages at a platinum mine in South Africa and were fired upon by heavily armed officers. 34 were killed.

#The Republican National Convention is upon us. Kicking things off will be the March on the RNC on August 27. Occupy Wall Street is planning to charter busloads of protesters south for the festivities. CODEPINK would like you to send your vagina artwork to the Republican National Committee. Food Not Bombs will furnish 1,000 supporters to distribute food.

#The Tampa city council agreed to abandon its efforts to evict “Romneyville,” the camp that emerged to protest the RNC. But when the convention ends, Occupy Tampa will be searching for new space, as it has mere weeks to clear its occupation.

#It’s been 11 months and four days since Occupy Wall Street began, and a first anniversary call to action has been issued.

#The White House filed an appeal in hope of reversing a federal judge’s ruling that bans the indefinite military detention of Americans because attorneys for the president say they are justified to imprison alleged terrorists without charge. (No, the current president is not George W. Bush.)

#The Justice Department decided not to pursue criminal charges against Goldman Sachs related to accusations that the firm bet against the same subprime mortgage securities it was selling to clients. And the no accountability victory lap continues.

Michelle Mantone raises a fist at the Occupy Gracie Mansion for All Abilities action in New York. Photo: Mickey Z-Vegan.

#But there’s some good news on this front: Pretty much everybody in the world with subpoena power has hit JPMorgan Chase with requests for information in the Libor-rigging conspiracy. Here’s Der Spiegel’s behind the scenes coverage of the scandal.

#Sandy Weill is not alone: meet the bankers having second thoughts about Too Big To Fail.

#A new report revealed how wealthy individuals and their families hide between $21 and $32 trillion in offshore accounts and tax havens.

#Nearly one in two Americans – 46 percent – die “with virtually no financial assets,” or less than $10,000, according to a recent study.

#New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled the NYPD’s latest crime-tracking and surveillance system, Domain Awareness, the product of a joint venture with Microsoft, which developed the system’s complex network of 3,000 cameras and 2,600 radiation detectors. The cameras – mostly focused on midtown and the Financial District – can be accessed at a moment’s notice to run license plates or criminal records. New York is now poised to become the surveillance capital of America.

#Stop-and-frisks in New York have dropped by 34 percent in recent months because police commanders have grown wary of pushing for such stops at daily roll calls. But often overlooked is how frequently police officers use some level of physical force in these encounters – those stopped say that if they show the slightest bit of resistance, even verbally, they can find themselves slammed against walls, forced to the ground and with officers’ guns pointed at their heads. And cops apparently aren’t taught how to stop-and-frisk women differently from men, causing women to feel victimized. A Quinnipiac University survey found that 57 percent of white city voters approve of stop-and-frisk, while only 25 percent of black voters and 53 percent of Hispanics said they approve. A majority of New Yorkers believe the NYPD favors white people.

#Robert Stolarik, a New York Times photographer who covered Occupy Wall Street and was harassed by the NYPD for doing so, was arrested while on assignment in the Bronx in an episode that appears to be retribution for his insistence upon press freedom. The NYPD is still aggressively violating free press and assembly at protests.

Demonstrators at a solidarity rally in Detroit for GM workers in Colombia. Photo: Frank Hammer

#Senior Department of Homeland Security officials debated whether they should pressure Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings to “pull down” a report he published on the magazine’s web site about the agency’s role in monitoring Occupy Wall Street, according to hundreds of pages of internal DHS emails.

#Obama reportedly told the General Services Administration to “stand down” on arresting Occupy Portland protestors last year.

#Nearly a year after the occupation of Zuccotti Park the police have it essentially locked down, with police cameras trained on the site and private security guards from Brookfield Properties continually in residence. A memorandum surfaced indicating that the police agreed to enforce unposted rules restricting activities there.

#A broad coalition of New York City Council members who rarely see eye-to-eye on the same issue came together in an attempt to reform the NYPD’s appalling handling of car accident investigations, spurred by the widow of a pedestrian who was fatally struck while crossing the street – with no consequences for the drunk driver. “The NYPD’s crash investigation system is fatally flawed,” Councilmember Brad Lander said at a City Hall press conference. “40% of the time when someone is killed, nobody even gets a traffic ticket.”

#In somewhat more cheerful NYPD news, the police department’s legal team has refused to defend Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who famously pepper sprayed two female Occupy protesters in an incident that evoked horror across the country. Ray Kelly criticized the decision. Bologna will be represented by his union instead.

#More pepper-sprayed Occupy activists have sued the NYPD.

#A report by New York University and Fordham Law Schools found that the NYPD consistently overstepped its powers while policing the Occupy Movement.

A Las Vegas billboard spotlights the dire state of the unemployed.

#A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling regarding the excessive use of police force is good news for Occupiers pressing suit against police and governments for their brutal use of force against peaceful protesters.

#Where is the outrage over activist prosecutions? Dennis Etler asked in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

#Monitoring the police contributes to public safety, wrote the man who filmed a cop body-slamming a Sunset Park teenager during an arrest in a subway station.

#After more than 800,000 votes, Puerto Rico rejected constitutional amendments that would have reduced the size of the legislature and given judges the right to deny bail in certain murder cases. The referendum’s result means that Puerto Rico remains the only place in the Western Hemisphere where everyone is entitled to bail regardless of the alleged crime.

#When activists in Oakland began to refurbish a library that has stood empty since the 1970s, it wasn’t long before people began to stop in and look around. Many were amazed by the quick progress; others were happy to attend a potluck. But the city and police had other ideas, raiding the new People’s Library on August 14. Despite this, the library continues to operate – it’s now the only 24-hour library in the country.

#Blockaders braved a wall of bulldozers and unfurled banners that warned TransCanada to expect resistance the size of Texas if the company proceeds with construction of a pipeline to carry Canadian tar sands through the region as part of Keystone XL’s hastily rebranded “Gulf Coast Project.”

The sign says it all. Photo: Jess Hunter-Bowman

#Protesters of all ages successfully blockaded the Texas headquarters of Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services company.

#Activists #occupied key nuclear power-related facilities on the 67th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

#Three members of Occupy Charlotte were found not guilty on charges of resisting, obstructing or delaying officers eight months after they were arrested as their camp was dismantled.

#A protester belonging to an Occupy group in rural Pennsylvania is being charged with felony attempted bank robbery and a terrorism-related charge for holding signs up during a demonstration at a local Wells Fargo branch.

#Scott Olsen and members of Iraq Veterans Against War #occupied Obama Campaign Headquarters in Oakland demanding the release of Pfc. Bradley (Breanna) Manning.

#In Iowa, Occupiers and members of the local Tea Party chapter teamed up against red light cameras.

#Tom Morello sounded off about Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan in an op-ed for Rolling Stone: “Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.”

#An estimated 1,500 conservative activists gathered in Cleveland’s Willard Park in a rally and march dubbed “Occupy the Truth,” which protested liberal bias in the mainstream media. “The goal of Occupy The Truth is to inject some honesty into the narrative of just how potentially violent the Occupy movement can be,” Jim Hoft wrote without irony at the Gateway Pundit.

#Another day, another scary government surveillance program. Meet Trapwire, which the media is already whitewashing. In Australia the story was retracted from a number of sites.

An anti-pipeline demonstration on Manhattan’s west side. Photo: Kate Conway

#The theater world has been #occupied: “Mr. Satan Goes to Wall Street,” a musical satire inspired by and depicting the Occupy Movement, tells the story of Satan after he is laid off from Hell because humanity has become too adept at evil. Humanity, in this case, is mostly represented by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. “For The Greater Good, or The Last Election,” performed by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, transformed the Occupy protests into a melodrama.”Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy #S17,” a cabaret focusing on the one-year anniversary of Occupy, will open at Joe’s Pub in New York on September 17. New York’s Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble will portray members of the Occupy Movement who have just arrived from a nearby protest with the intention of performing Bizet’s Carmen.

#For some reason, liberal/libertarian billionaire Mark Cuban is releasing “Occupy Unmasked,” an Occupy exposé produced by the late Andrew Breitbart and Citizens United.

#In the movie “The Campaign,” Zack Galifianakis and Will Ferrell play the Motch brothers, thinly veiled versions of the Koch brothers. “I disagree with everything they do,” Galifianakis told the New York Daily News. “They are creepy and there is no way around that. It’s not freedom what they are doing.” The Kochs were not pleased: “Last we checked, the movie is a comedy,” a Koch spokesperson told CNN. “Maybe more to the point is that it’s laughable to take political guidance or moral instruction from a guy who makes obscene gestures with a monkey on a bus in Bangkok.”

#In Chicago, activists #occupied the Air and Water Show to perform some political theater.

#From Vermont to Texas to Appalachia to New York, this summer has seen activists mobilize against dirty power. Here is why it’s so dangerous. And here is some good information for fracktivists.

General Motors hunger strikers in Bogotá. Photo: Austin Robles

#Drillers in Utah have a friend in the Bureau of Land Management, which seems to confused as to whether it serves corporations or people.

#Chalk is now politically charged: Activists and children are being cited nationwide for chalk drawings on sidewalks. In Austin, troopers intimidated children and arrested activists at a Chalkupy the World event. New Zealand also participated. A Virginia mother has agreed to 50 hours of community service after her 4-year-old daughter used chalk to draw on rocks on Belle Isle in Richmond.

#Adam “Ademo” Mueller, a journalist and radio show host, is facing 21 years in prison for reporting on police brutality toward students at a Manchester, New Hampshire, high school.

#When activists were excluded from the Doheny Surf Festival because they planned to distribute information about the San Onofore Nuclear Reactor, they set up a tent outside the perimeter.

#Every summer, Angela Prattis feeds 60 children a day who can’t afford to eat. But the city of Philadelphia told her she must stop – unless she can come up with $1,000 for a permit.

#Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate were arrested at a sit-in at a Philadelphia bank over housing foreclosures.

#Officers from the Portland police forced their way into a newly created community center inside of a duplex owned by Alicia Jackson, which had been illegally foreclosed on by the banks in 2011. The duplex had been reclaimed earlier in the day by 250 people from the surrounding community during a neighborhood block party.

#Oakland, historical haven of activism, was profiled in the New York Times and dubbed the “spiritual capital of Occupy Wall Street.”

#A Northeast Cobb County, Atlanta, homeowner in a protracted battle with Wells Fargo to prevent the foreclosure of his home has been occupying his front lawn for more than a month. He has a hearing on August 31; here is what you can do to help.

#Occupy Bergen County held a protest in front of a Bank of America in Westwood.

#Las Vegas residents awoke to a shocking billboard featuring a mannequin dangling on a hangman’s noose below a black sign with the ominous words “Dying for Work.” Another read “Hope You’re Happy With Wall Street.”

#Workers at a Subway sandwich shop at the Oakland airport have been fired for trying to unionize.

#In San Francisco, more than two thousand building cleaners shut down the city’s main artery, Market Street, in a huge march. They are ready to strike over wages and health care costs.

#A settlement has been negotiated between CODEPINK activist Rae Abileah and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) volunteer lobbyist Stanley Shulster, who viciously assaulted her for denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine during a speech in 2011.

#After a seven-month vigil, Occupy Homes MN claimed a victory in North Minneapolis.

#After the house of Rain Burroughs, a 49-year-old single mother in Richmond, Virginia, was slated for foreclosure, her community – led by Anonymous and Gloria Steinem – rallied together and raised the necessary $13,000 in 38 hours.

#The $25 billion foreclosure settlement the Obama administration and state attorneys general struck in February with the nation’s five largest mortgage companies is mired in bureaucracy – lost files, phone transfers to nowhere – and not really helping homeowners.

#The police officer at the center of the U.C. Davis pepper-spraying scandal last fall is no longer on the force.

#After 15 days in jail, Danny L. Johnson, Chicago NATO protestor and member of Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Walk USA, was released.

Photo: Pete Shaw

#The city of Lansing has dropped all charges against Occupy Lansing protestors who refused to leave Reutter Park after curfew.

#Occupy Memphis has been evicted from Civic Center Plaza.

#In a great example of creative direct action that went viral, gays offended by Chick fil-A’s gay marriage stance organized a kiss-in in front of Chick-fil-A stores nationwide. Meanwhile, after being confronted with the hatred of their neighbors, who flocked to buy chicken sandwiches to show their disapproval of gay marriage, Chick-fil-A’s gay employees feel like aliens in their own towns.

#Despite the fact that the Supreme Court struck down mandatory life without parole for kids convicted of murder, minors can still get life-without-parole sentences — just not automatically after a conviction.

#Private prison companies like CCA and Geo Group spend $45 million in lobbying and rake in $5.1 billion for immigrant detention alone.

#A San Francisco city supervisor has proposed the elimination of a little-known portion of the parks code written in 1981 that bans demonstrating and leafleting in large swaths of the city’s parks.

#Lupe Fiasco, musician and occupier, told CNN, ”This nation was founded by rebels and revolutionaries, and its flags were carried across the battlefields by people who were very, very against the status quo and who questioned and criticized.”

#In an anachronistic twist, women are going to Mexico for their health care needs in the wake of draconian laws that have closed women’s clinics near the border in the name of outlawing abortion.

#Occupy Hong Kong got their marching orders from the courts on August 13, but they vowed to stay.

A performance of “Mr Satan Goes To Wall Street” in New York City. Photo: Jessica Wohlander

#A federal court has given Chevron and Transocean 30 days to suspend all petroleum drilling and transportation operations in Brazil until investigations are completed into two oil spills off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.

#Hundreds of students #occupied high schools and blocked traffic in Chile’s capital to demand education reform.

#Iceland holds some key lessons for nations trying to survive bailouts after the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery. So what worked? A decision to push losses on to bondholders instead of taxpayers and the safeguarding of a welfare system that shielded the unemployed from penury. America, are you listening?

#Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, the mayor of the town of Marinaleda in the southern region of Andalusia, has been staging robberies at supermarkets and giving stolen groceries to the poor, earning him the nickname “The Robin Hood Mayor.”

#200 members of Spain’s Andalusian fieldworkers’ union went to two supermarkets, filled up ten shopping carts with milk, sugar, chickpeas, pasta, rice and other basic necessities, and walked out without paying. They proceeded to donate the food to 26 families in Sevilla and three civic centers in three towns in the province of Cádiz.

#Members of Mexico’s Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity began a Caravan for Peace across the U.S. to demand change in the violent drug policy that has been imposed by their neighbors to the north. The caravan will pass through more than 25 American cities in a month.

Another Las Vegas billboard.

#Occupy London is divided over Julian Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London after being granted political asylum in the South American country.

#Kicking off the Two Countries, One Voice campaign, Occupy Wall Street protested Mexican media titan Carlos Slim Helú at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to express solidarity with Yo Soy 132, Mexico’s anti-mainstream media movement, which is growing by leaps and bounds outside of Mexico. Helú owns a large chunk of Saks.

#Bryn Phillips, a writer and community organizer who served as a spokesman for the protesters who occupied St Paul’s Cathedral, stood in a City of London byelection. Occupy your government.

#During the opening ceremonies for the London Olympics, more than 130 activists on bicycles, including members of Occupy London, attempted to breach the Olympic park’s security cordon. The entire city was essentially a police state during the Games.

#Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Montreal the day a provincial election by the Liberal Party government of Quebec Premier Jean Charest was called.

#Occupy Frankfurt‘s camp was cleared by German police, who dubbed it a “health hazard.”

#The financial crisis and resulting austerity measures have driven more than 1,000 people to suicide in the United Kingdom.

#ProPublica revealed how nonprofits spend millions in “dark money” on elections and call it “public welfare.” (We’re looking at you, Koch brothers.)

#The same problems that plagued the foreclosure process — and prompted a multibillion-dollar settlement with big banks — are now emerging in the debt collection practices of credit card companies.

PeaceShow 2012: #Occupied. Photo: Occupy Chicago Press Relations

#French president François Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on incomes above a million euros a year, and “Les Riches” are panicking.

#Here are 20 infamous quotes Wall Street wishes were never made public.

#Thousands of retirees are learning that defaulting on student debt can threaten something that used to be untouchable: their Social Security benefits.

#In the wake of an investigation that revealed 1.3 million law enforcement requests for mobile phone info from providers, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) released a draft of a bill, the Wireless Surveillance Act of 2012, that would put some limits on those requests, including requiring a court order for location tracking.

#Right-wing media have distorted efforts by President Obama’s re-election campaign to restore early voting for all Ohio voters, claiming the campaign is suing to restrict voting for members of the military.

#The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency established after the Florida ballot disaster of 2000 to ensure that every vote gets counted, is leaderless and adrift just two months before voting.

#The mayor of Philadelphia called voter ID laws “a bad solution in search of a problem.” Voting is getting harder for college students attending school far from home, who tend to be more politically progressive.

#The far-right former Florida GOP chair openly admitted being a part of regular meetings where “keeping blacks from voting” was discussed. Voter ID laws and purges from the voter rolls violate federal law.

#Our economic ruin means freedom for the super-rich.

#Over the last decade, the Bush tax cuts have delivered $1 million in tax breaks for the average millionaire.

#The San Francisco Police Department has underreported the arrest rates of the city’s two largest minority groups for years, misclassifying Latino arrestees as “white” and Asian arrestees as “other.”

#A new study shows that helping homeowners avoid foreclosures actually saves taxpayer money.

#The U.S. government has been collecting data on nearly every U.S. citizen and assembling webs of their relationships, National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney revealed.

A message of solidarity projected by The Illuminator on a Con Ed power plant in New York. Photo: Jenna Pope Photography

#For a real revolution, Occupy Madison Avenue, Co.Exist suggests.

#A global day against fracking has been proposed for September 22.

#Have you read the latest issue of the Occupied Daytona News Journal yet?

#Here’s a home for Occupy-related petitions.

#Are you one of the 99%? (If you’re reading this, you probably are.) Send in a postcard.

#Have you seen the police state Mastercard parody? It’s priceless.

Want to report news about your occupation or meetup? Email me at JenSacks77@gmail.com.

This week’s roundup was brought to you in conjunction with Occupy ALL the Updates, curated by citizen journalist SIUKittyPie, and Occupier and journalist Kelli Daley.

Blockaders braved a wall of bulldozers early Thursday morning and unfurled banners that warned TransCanada to expect resistance the size of Texas if the company proceeds with construction of a pipeline to carry Canadian tar sands through the region as part of Keystone XL’s hastily rebranded “Gulf Coast Project.”

TransCanada broke ground last week on the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, bucking more than four years of intense opposition to the project from farmers, ranchers and local communities representing thousands of people affected across Texas and Oklahoma.

There was no official ribbon-cutting ceremony to inaugurate construction at the pipeline’s staging area last week—in fact, TransCanada’s careful PR control and political pressures led to a virtual media blackout on the subject.

Instead, members of the Tar Sands Blockade a broad affiliation of activists opposing the project, traveled Thursday seven miles west of Paris, Texas, to christen the construction site in their own way: with a day of defiance, and the promise of rolling actions for as long as the pipeline plan proceeds.

“TransCanada is putting families that wanted nothing to do with this pipeline in harm’s way,” says blockade organizer Ron Seifert. “Since our leaders and representatives will do nothing to protect our friends and neighbors, the Tar Sands Blockade is calling for people everywhere to join us and defend our local communities from a multinational bully.”

Plans to integrate the proposed Gulf Coast Segment with the existing Keystone System would allow extractors in Canada to send a toxic tar sands slurry to the export market on the Gulf Coast. Creating minimal short-term construction jobs, the expansion of the oil industry will pad the pockets of Gulf Coast refineries—which operate in a foreign trade zone that evades state and federal taxes—while endangering the health and livelihoods of hundreds of communities between Cushing, Okla., and Port Arthur, Tex.

TransCanada’s desperate reshuffling of the project, re-routing the pipeline through Oklahoma rather than much-contested Nebraska, came after 1,253 people were arrested in Washington, DC, last fall. The sustained protests at the White House, including another demonstration in November in which more than 12,000 encircled the White House, pushed President Obama to reject the permit for the $7 billion Keystone expansion, stating that not enough time had been given for a proper environmental review.

But in March, the president traveled to Cushing, Okla., where he announced plans to expedite the pipeline’s southern portion as part of his “all of the above” energy strategy—leaving landowners, ranchers, indigenous communities and thousands of local citizens in the shadow of the refineries, with the deadly pollution they imply.

“I am told the pipeline is so we won’t have to buy ‘blood oil,’” says Cherokee activist and Grand River Keeper Earl Hatley, who is co-founder of Clean Energy Future Oklahoma. “The pollution killing First Nations peoples [in Canada] and destruction of their culture by greedy multi-national oil barons is akin to the long ago practice of providing small pox blankets to our people here in America.

“We native peoples who fight the destruction of the great Boreal Forest for our relatives in Alberta call tar sands blood oil,” he says.

Events on Thursday were also staged in Dallas and Houston, where protestors standing in solidarity with rural landowners say TransCanada bullied and manipulated residents across the state, forcing the pipeline’s construction through the use of eminent domain—a legal maneuver that allows corporations to seize private citizens’ property without their consent.

“TransCanada lied to me from day one,” says Susan Scott, a landowner in East Texas whose property will be condemned. “I worked 37 years for my farm, and TransCanada believes it is entitled to a piece of my home.”

While many landowners along the pipeline route in Texas said they signed easement agreements with TransCanada out of fear of being sued, another landowner, Julia Trigg Crawford, is still holding out. Her case went to court in Paris on Friday, with a ruling to be issued shortly.

Cases like Crawford’s display the immense legal power and strategies employed by multinational corporations in the fossil fuel industry, whose arguments for eminent domain enable them to continue profiting from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels at the expense of local communities and the climate.

“In the midst of record heat and drought, this just adds insult to injury,” says 350.org founder Bill McKibben, who has led the fight against the Keystone pipeline since last year. July was the hottest month ever recorded in the U.S., bringing with it drought conditions that now threaten more than half the nation. “More risk, more carbon, more heat,” adds McKibben, “all the things farmers and ranchers don’t need.”

The Tar Sands Blockade is part of a burgeoning direct action movement against fossil fuel extraction—coined as the “Summer of Solidarity”—now taking shape across the nation. This week in Montana, residents occupied the state capitol in Helena to begin eight days of civil disobedience as part of theCoal Export Action aimed at halting mining operations at Otter Creek and shipments of coal westward to Asian markets from the Powder River Basin.

Over the summer, other direct actions have focused on stopping mountaintop coal removal, or strip mining, in West Virginia; barring fracking operations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York; and enacting a “human oil spill” in Vermont to protest a proposed Tar Sands pipeline and other polluting energy projects slated to be built through the heart of New England.

And so, in the Lone Star State, it too begins. The board is set and the pieces are moving.

Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth: Anaheim, July 26. Photo: Justin Wedes

This week in Occupy, the people of Anaheim continued their stand against a trigger-happy police force, Occupy activists got raided by the FBI, the NYPD was finally called out for its Occupy-related human rights abuses, and 13 years after he aggressively lobbied Congress to repeal Glass-Steagall, former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill said, “Just kidding!”

#Anaheim residents continued their protests over the the police shooting of two Latino men, demonstrating by the thousands in the neighborhood where police ran down an unarmed suspected gang member and shot him to death. “There were pieces of brain on the darn grass, in front of all these children, in front of all these people,” one resident said. “This traumatizes people, and these people are angry.” On July 24 protesters rallied on the steps of Anaheim’s city hall, where police pulled guns only to be confronted by angry protesters, who forced cops to retreat. Livestreamer Tim Pool and two local journalists were fired at by police, who shot rubber bullets into the crowd. The brutality sparked a march. On July 28, about 100 protesters gathered outside one of the entrances to Anaheim’s best-known landmark, Disneyland. Happiest place on earth, indeed. It’s worth noting that while Disneyland sustains Anaheim’s economy, the surrounding area is mired in poverty. On July 29, a crowd of about 250 demonstrators gathered outside police headquarters, resulting in two arrests.

The Occupy Wall Street Library Book Bloc

#The Los Angeles offices of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition were ransacked because of their support of the people in Anaheim. Their computers, bullhorns, protest equipment and files were stolen and destroyed. The Coalition has been receiving hateful, racist phone calls supporting the Anaheim Police.

#Vermont activists were questioned on July 26 by two FBI agents seeking information about the Northeast Governors’ Conference in Burlington that weekend. The visit follows a week of FBI raids on houses affiliated with anarchists in search of “anarchist literature.”  The homes of activists are being raided in Seattle, Portland and Olympia on grand jury subpoenas, their property confiscated without explanation.

#Timothy Geithner was grilled by Congress about the LIBOR interest rate-rigging scandal. Lawmakers took aim at the Treasury secretary for going easy on Wall Street despite knowing that banks had been trying to manipulate LIBOR since 2008, but Geithner escaped relatively unscathed from the two-hour-plus hearing, with Barney Frank declaring that it was the banks, not regulators, that “grievously misbehaved.”

#Here’s ProPublica’s definitive LIBOR timeline detailing who knew what and when.

#Sandy Weill, the former Citigroup CEO who aggressively lobbied for – and won – the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which had separated commercial and investment banks since 1933, said he thinks the big banks should break up their banking divisions after all. Which is like Ronald McDonald calling for the abolition of hamburgers, or Donald Trump calling for a ban on gold trim, wrote Mark Gongloff on HuffPo. Does this means Weill’s now sweet on Occupy? Not quite, wrote Kevin Drum in Mother Jones – it’s actually not all that uncommon for elder statesmen who are no longer running things to have a change of heart. You know, after they’ve made billions from changing the laws to benefit themselves.

#“Suppressing Protest,” a report by a group of civil and human rights attorneys, paints the clearest picture yet of the New York City police department’s aggressive tactics and over-policing, all of which resulted in the systemic suppression of the basic rights of Occupy protesters. The report, a joint project of New York University Law School’s Global Justice Clinic and the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic, goes beyond the pepper-spraying incidents that went viral, culling media accounts, video footage, Twitter feeds and legal observers’ own experiences, enumerating a total of 130 specific incidents in which police are alleged to have used excessive force. Here are 14 specific allegations of Occupy-related brutality.

A demonstrator protests immigration raids in Downtown Los Angeles in the 1940s. Photo: The Los Angeles Times archive at UCLA

#It’s clearly not the NYPD’s week: As a 19-year-old was being frisked after allegedly vandalizing a subway station and jumping the turnstile, he made the mistake of flinching when touched between the legs, prompting the arresting officer to body slam him – twice. The NYPD also painted over a mural on the facade of an Inwood building that featured the text “We know the real murderers,” the last word blown-up and bullet-ridden, surrounded by tombstones for various controversial organizations including McDonald’s, Halliburton, Shell Oil, Bank of America – and the NYPD. Even though New York City graffiti artist Alan Ket had the permission of the building’s owner to paint freely on the outside wall, a pair of plainclothes officers armed with buckets of black paint, rollerbrushes and drop cloths painted right over it, calling it “a bad idea.” Another thing the NYPD apparently considers a “bad idea”: the First Amendment.

#As if there weren’t enough police cameras tracking New Yorkers’ every move, the NYPD will soon launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System,” developed by Microsoft, that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists.

#“I don’t understand why police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.” No, that wasn’t former Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis. It was Michael Bloomberg, Occupy-smasher, advocating a labor revolt on CNN.

#In pursuit of its goal of spying on all Muslims everywhere, New York’s finest crossed the Hudson River to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to establish a secret surveillance outpost, the AP reported last year. What wasn’t previously reported was how the police were discovered: by their building superintendent, who called 911 because he thought he’d stumbled upon a terror cell.

#Shocker: The U.S. military is being used to protect civilian events, like the 2012 Democratic and Republican Party National Conventions in Tampa and Charlotte. More than 20,000 troops were brought home and readied for deployment within the U.S. to assist in “civil unrest and crowd control.”

#CNN anchor TJ Holmes was pulled over for driving while black near Atlanta and tweeted the entire episode.

Adrienne Lauby participates in a “flash nap” on the lawn at Santa Rosa City Hall. Photo: Christopher Chung

#On July 28, 38 people slept on the sidewalk outside Trinity Wall Street Church, where they were harassed by senior officers, or “white shirts.” Find out why they occupy.

#The Occupy Wall Street Library held a workshop on Governors Island focusing on Book Blocs, whereby activists create book cover shields to use for protests.

#For the third time in four months, Occupy Santa Rosa staged a flash-mob of nappers to protest a city ordinance prohibiting sleeping outdoors, which they say unfairly penalizes the homeless.

#The Occupy Movement has made its way onto the stage, most recently at the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C.

#The targets of the FBI’s Portland raid have spoken out, pledging not to answer any questions during their court appearance other than their names. In other PDX news: Portland activists have rallied around Annette Steele,  a homeowner being forced out by Citigroup, the Portland Occupier reported. A visibly gaunt Cameron Whitten, one-time Occupy mayoral candidate, ended his hunger strike after 55 days. And several members of the Cascadia Now! Movement gathered across from President Obama’s fundraiser and dropped a large banner depicting a Sasquatch foot kicking a Monopoly man holding a money bag, with the words “WAR”, “OIL”, and “COAL” written across it.

#5,000 people from all over the nation – and various parts of the world including Australia – united on July 29 on the west lawn of the Capitol demanding Congress take immediate action to stop fracking.

#During a demonstration that shut down East Avenue on July 21, a livestreamer in Rochester had his equipment confiscated.

#More than 50 West Virginia protesters affiliated with the R.A.M.P.S. Campaign walked onto Patriot Coal’s Hobet Surface Mine 45 — part of one of the largest mountaintop removal complexes in Appalachia – and shut it down. They are now being held on a combined $500,000 bail and need your help.

#PBS asked if we should worry about mercenary occupiers.

This is what democracy does not look like: The offices of ANSWER Los Angeles after being ransacked. Photo: ANSWER Los Angeles

#Bank of America has decided to renegotiate the terms of a Minnesota homeowner Ruby Brown’s mortgage just days before it was scheduled to be auctioned off following a week of action by Occupy Our Homes MN and other groups.

#In light of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Occupy OC suspended its protests of Mitt Romney’s campaign to show solidarity with the massacre’s victims. President Obama was not so lucky, as protests in Oakland drew hundreds.

#On July 20, just 24 hours after a new camera policy was enacted by the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C. that forbids the confiscation of cameras and cameraphones and disallows police from ordering citizens to stop filming or taking photos of police action, the cops took the phone of a local resident trying to record officers who were punching a man they were arresting.

#The Seattle Police Department has reached an agreement with the Justice Department on a set of reforms designed to curb use of excessive force by the city’s police officers, CNN reported.

#About 500 people critical of the economic impact and corporate flavor of the London Olympics marched near the Olympic Park, determined to send a message that Britain is not united in backing the games.

#Several cyclists were arrested as they performed their monthly “Critical Mass” protest ride in London, joined by members of Occupy London. The cyclists had been served an order to stay away from the Olympic site, and police intervened when they apparently breached the regulations. The demonstration was the latest in a string of protests sparked by fears of environmental degradation.

The Gain in Spain: Indignados remain strong. Raúl G. Villalón / Flickr

#Angry demonstrators entered a government office in the port city of Qidong, near Shanghai, on July 28 and smashed computers and destroyed furniture to protest a waste discharge plant that they said would pollute the water supply.

#More than 20,000 people marched on Japan’s parliament on July 29 to demand a ban on nuclear power.

#Talks over the UN Arms Trade Treaty fell apart on July 27, effectively killing the agreement. The Arms Trade Treaty Legal Blog reports that the process seemed to be moving to completion when the United States requested an extension to the time allotted to negotiate the agreement, opening the door to other countries to begin registering more complex objections.

#The Spanish protest movement is finally getting new life from the previously discounted working class.

#In the Amazonian back country, tribes are challenging construction of the world’s third-largest dam—by dismantling it.

#The Yo Soy 132 Académicos, academics from several Mexican universities, released this statement on the controversial July 1 presidential elections in which Enrique Peña Nieto claimed victory.

#Instead of covering LIBOR, one of the largest banking scandals in history, American television news outlets focused on the divorce of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, shark sightings and a chimpanzee attack.

#Rep. Dennis Kucinich demanded an audit of the Federal Reserve.

Foreclosure defense enlivens Portland. Photo: Pete Shaw/The Portland Occupier

#Don Delves, an independent compensation consultant who worked for Best Buy for seven years, resigned from the company in protest after more than 100 managers received bonuses that weren’t tied to performance.

#The Senate GOP plans to preserve the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000 already amounts to a budget-busting tax cut for the rich, yet Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch added an estate tax cut that benefits only the super-wealthy.

#Pennsylvania officials conceded that they had no evidence of prior in-person voter fraud, or even any reason to believe that such crimes would occur with more frequency if a voter ID law wasn’t in effect. The state is engaged in litigation over its voter ID law, one of the nation’s strictest.

#Last week we reported that Skype won’t say whether it can eavesdrop on your calls; this week The Washington Post reported that Skype has increased its cooperation with law enforcement to give police access to online chats and other user data, including credit card numbers and addresses.

#A protest by the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church was cut short after nearly 300 people dressed as zombies and drowned out the church members. Looks like a trend.

#Prop 37 in California would impose mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods.

#Here are the top 10 genetically modified foods to avoid.

#Growing up black in Mississippi you’re always on parole, as this excellent longread demonstrates.

Photo: MR.H

#The Obama administration so far has awarded hefty new federal family planning grants to Planned Parenthood clinics in three states that have cut the providers’ funding: New Jersey, Tennessee and North Carolina.

#On July 26, the Republican-led Michigan Senate Judiciary Committee approved an extensive anti-choice measure that would make it next to impossible to obtain abortion medication, enact unnecessary screening requirements and mandate irrational physical plant requirements that could shut down almost every clinic in the state.

#Former Lockheed Martin vice president Ann Elise Sauer was hired by Sen. John McCain in February as the top Republican staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The revolving door swings regularly in Washington, but the size of the compensation package Sauer received from Lockheed when she left the company is notable: $1.6 million in compensation around the time she took a buyout in January 2011.

#Kenichi Watanabe, the chief executive of Japan’s Nomura Group bank and the architect of its boldest expansion move – the 2008 acquisition of the Asian and European operations of Lehman Brothers – resigned, as did the chief operating officer, in the aftermath of an insider trading scandal.

#In Sweden, file-sharing is a religion.

#The battle for Internet sovereignty continues: Senator Lamar Smith just introduced a bill called the Intellectual Property Attache Act (IPAA), which incorporates much of the wording from SOPA and PIPA and is meant to “promote a level playing field for American innovators abroad and American job creation.”

Occupy LA, Pershing Square, July 17. Photo: Giles Clarke

#INDECT is an E.U. research project to further develop existing surveillance technologies and combine into an instrument of operational policing, which allows you to monitor a comprehensive urban environment. Learn how to stop it.

#A San Francisco police officer shot to death a 32-year-old chocolate factory worker who was suspected of having slashed a friend with a box cutter, and an Occupy SF activist captured witness testimony that implicates the cops.

#Palermo’s Pizza fired scores of employees at its Milwaukee factory citing immigration violations shortly after workers said they wanted to organize.

#Baltimore is actually not using every last dollar in its law enforcement budget to chase down and harass brown-skinned immigrants in a desperate attempt to focus the anger of the majority on a target that cannot fight back. Imagine that.

#The stigma of unemployment starts a month after you lose your job.

#McClatchy’s Washington Bureau established a no-alter quote policy, whereby they refuse to read politicians’ quotes back to them and allow their words to be edited. In case you weren’t aware, the MSM does this constantly.

#In order to get his golf course built in Scotland, Donald Trump told the local government he would be creating 6,000 jobs. He then bulldozed the landscapes, bullied the people, and lied through his teeth. A new documentary shows the Scottish people organizing against Trump.

Sign on the wall of the Paul Robeson Freedom School. Photo: Justin Wedes

#Here’s a guide to defending yourself against tear gas.

#Occupy Sacramento‘s Foreclosure Action Team has demanded an immediate foreclosure moratorium in California.

#According to Occupy Arrests, 7,379 people have been arrested since Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, 2011.

Want to report news about your occupation or meetup? Email me at JenSacks77@gmail.com.

This week’s roundup was brought to you in conjunction with Occupy ALL the Updates, curated by citizen journalist SIUKittyPie, and Occupier and journalist Kelli Daley.

There’s no smiling in baseball! Photo: The Tax Dodgers

This week in Occupy, Southern California erupted, the Occupied Chicago Tribune won the battle to keep its name, The Tax Dodgers were honored at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and time is running out to prosecute the financial crimes of 2008.

Judge, Jury and Executioner: Anaheim police shot and killed an unarmed suspected gang member. Photo: Occupy California

#The shooting of an unarmed man named Manuel Diaz—a “known gang member”—by an Anaheim police officer prompted protesters to storm the Anaheim Police Department on July 22. A day earlier, as officers were investigating what happened at the scene where Diaz was killed, an angry group of residents gathered and demanded answers for the killing. Officers responded by detaining several people and firing tear gas, rubber bullets and and beanbag rounds into the crowd. The same day, in an unrelated incident, a second man was shot and killed by police. Anger in Anaheim, home of Disneyland, has been growing for years, and residents have been protesting the police every Monday for the past three months. The clash reached its apex on July 25, when 24 were arrested after confronting police officers downtown, still understandably upset at the murder of an unarmed man in their neighborhood.

#The 626 Wilshire occupation was covered in the Los Angeles Times. The LAPD officers who fired rubber bullets, bean bags and tear gas at the Art Walk crowd in downtown L.A. on July 12 blamed their actions on “an acceleration of tension” and “vandalism” from the activists writing on the sidewalks with chalk. A petition has been drawn up calling on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to have the incident investigated. Occupy Los Angeles would like the mayor held accountable for the unprovoked police brutality.

#Alexander Schaefer, the artist behind the “burning banks” series whose popularity skyrocketed at the height of the Occupy LA encampment, was arrested July 23 for writing on a public sidewalk in chalk in front of a downtown Chase Bank. Here’s a video of his arrest.

#Occupy Wall Street‘s faux baseball team, The Tax Dodgers, were given their own exhibit in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. No joke!

Occupy Town Square, Jackson Heights, July 23. Photo: Stacy Lanyon

#Occupy Town Square—a mobile, daytime outreach occupation held in parks and other public spaces around New York City to build the movement for economic, social, and environmental justice—was held in Jackson Heights, Queens, on July 22. Teach-ins about foreclosure and stop-and-frisk were offered and a puppet show and baseball game were staged before the evening culminated in a casseroles march.

#The World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva has denied The Chicago Tribune’s trademark claim against the Occupied Chicago Tribune, stating that Occupy is well-known enough not to be confused with its mainstream media counterpart.

#Seattle resident Angela Vogel married a corporation.

#Twitter is appealing a Manhattan judge’s ruling requiring it turn over tweets by demonstrator Malcolm Harris to the district attorney, saying that the decision “doesn’t strike the right balance between the rights of users and the interests of law enforcement.” But Twitter may be facing an uphill battle with its free speech stance.

#The involvement of Occupy Wall Street in The Strand’s recent contract negotiation renewed the energy of its workers and attracted media attention.

#Most guns recovered by the NYPD are not the result of stop-and-frisks, meaning police aren’t finding guns where they’re looking the hardest.

“I Take Thee, Me”: Seattleite Angela Vogel marries a corporation. Photo: Alex Garland

#“Occupy National Gathering: Perspectives on Police” is a short film that attempts to portray the internal conflict over police confrontation at the Occupy National Gathering, particularly as it relates to the future of the movement, and includes interviews with former Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis, Un-Occupy Albuquerque activist Amalia Montoya and InterOccupy organizer Tamara Shapiro.

#A rent strike against a millionaire landlord caught fire in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with a sleep-in outside the three-building complex plagued by dangerous electrical problems. In addition to frequent power outages, the building’s landlord, Orazio Petito, and his superintendent kept the basement door locked, preventing city inspectors from cleaning out a room full of rotting garbage or fixing the overtaxed fuse box that constantly sparked and shorted, threatening to burn the whole building down.

#Occupy Wall Street‘s Janet Wilson is zig-zagging across America in an RV emblazoned with signs including “Release Bradley Manning” and “Info Collection Task Force Unit for Wikileaks,” a mobile extension of the Occupy protests that’s already journeyed 17,000-plus miles.

#At a gathering in Zuccotti Park, the NYPD targeted a woman sitting in a chair, knitting. Activists, hide your needles.

#SIUKittyPie, author of Occupy ALL the Updates and one of the contributors to this #Occupied Report, wrote of being surveilled and hacked by law enforcement.

#Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his NYPD are adamant about saving the Stop and Frisk program, regardless of how racist their tactics are.

#For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American.

#Six Wal-Mart heirs hold more wealth than 42% of Americans combined.

Janet Wilson’s “Our V.” Photo: B.C. Lorio

#The Securities and Exchange Commission is quickly running out of time to file charges against financial firms and high-level executives involved in fraud and other crimes leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

#It’s time to tie executive pay to workers’ pay.

#Northern California credit unions say resentment toward commercial bank practices has resulted in unprecedented growth in new accounts and borrowers.

#“Mr. Satan Goes to Wall Street,” an ambitious new show in Los Angeles, is a full-blown musical satire that’s a wistful paean to the Occupy Movement.

#San Francisco homeowners have formed Occupy Noe Valley with the express purpose of fighting foreclosures on behalf of their neighbors. Like neighboring Occupy Bernal Heights, they intend to be effective by not occupying.

#On July 18, fifteen activists protesting janitor employment conditions in Houston were arrested, sparking protests across the country as janitors in six other cities walked off the job in solidarity.

#A Phoenix woman who had to briefly abandon her loan modification with Bank of America and Fannie Mae to attend to her wounded son in a military hospital in Germany returned home to find that the bank had foreclosed on her. Her house had been cleared and her son’s Purple Hearts thrown away.

The 99 Mile March comes home. Photo: Stacy Lanyon

#Contractors hired by banks to protect abandoned properties against damage are terrifying homeowners by entering occupied homes after ignoring obvious signs of occupation, like lights turned on, mowed grass and furniture.

#Boston T riders at several downtown subway stations received a welcome surprise during their evening commute on July 13: a free ride home, courtesy of a fare strike to protest recently implemented fare hikes.

#Occupy Homes has spread to Massachusetts. Block by block, city by city…

#Members of Occupy New Hampshire incorporated the movement as a nonprofit, and soon decided that gun owners who openly carry are prohibited from future Occupy events.

#After collecting nearly 4,000 signatures, Occupy Merced and Tenants Together, a statewide renters rights group, filed a referendum to overturn the repeal of the Northern California city’s renters’ rights ordinance.

#President Barack Obama’s fundraising stop in Oakland on July 23 night drew vocal dissent from Occupy Oakland activists, anti-war protestors and medical cannabis advocates.

#Occupy Rochester was kettled and threatened by police during a July 21 march, leading to the arrests of 18 people. Even after they were menaced by police smacking their batons threateningly and pepper spraying the crowd, much of the group pushed past them to continue their march.

#Occupy Bohemian Grove protested the annual Bohemian Grove retreat held by the elite in a secluded camp in the redwoods of Monte Rio, California.

#Yang Yuanqing, the CEO of Lenovo, donated his $3 million bonus to his employees.

A Friday the 13th fare strike in Boston. Photo: Doug Enaa Greene

#Republicans have twice stopped the Senate from taking up the DISCLOSE Act, which would require outside groups spending hundreds of millions on campaign ads to reveal how much they spend and who their big donors are.

#A woman in Little Falls, Minnesota, was forced by the city to take down signs in her own yard that read, “Occupy Wall Street,” “Back the 99 Percent” and “Boycott Monsanto.” Signs supporting war, however, pass muster.

#A planned protest by the hateful Westboro Baptist Church was overshadowed when thousands of supporters gathered at the funeral of a fallen soldier and formed a human wall to block the radical church’s effort.

#The Florida Sun-Sentinel opined that the Occupy Movement still has a chance to flourish—if it gets organized.

#On Google Maps, Mashable reports, it’s easy to spot definitive lines of income inequality: wealthier neighborhoods have the most trees.

#Muskego, Wisconsin, is about to get its first “Cash Mob,” a concept that originated with Occupy Wall Street where large crowds of consumers show up at small businesses to spend money with the goal of keeping them afloat.

#Tampa is again ramping up “protection” for the Republican National Convention, clamping down on protests and limiting items people can carry.

#In a shock to the local administration, 90% of the Chicago Teachers Union voted for a strike action, which the Guardian optimistically reported could be an embarrassment to President Obama and re-ignite the American labor movement at a time of global unrest.

#Occupied: Bohemian Grove. Photo: Anne Sewell

#Occupy Hong Kong‘s fate is now in the hands of the courts, as HSBC has sought to clear the encampment in the plaza that runs underneath HSBC Holdings. It’s worth noting that while HSBC has been threatening occupiers with eviction, the banking giant has been cited for helping terrorists, drug cartels and other criminals launder money.

#A direct electoral challenge to the way the City of London is governed is set to be mounted this month by some of the activists and supporters of last year’s Occupy London protests at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

#Occupy London wants people to know about LIBOR, so they’re affixing “Liboration” stickers to bikes in the city’s bike share program. U.S. prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders and charging them with colluding to manipulate Libor, the London Interbank Offered Rate; here are some of the candidates.

#Citigroup reportedly manipulated Libor rates more than any other U.S. bank.

#ProPublica reports that some banks and lenders played fast and loose with student loans, aggressively marketing them to borrowers who couldn’t afford that amount of debt. ”Borrowers who took out loans at the height of the boom are still suffering from those excesses,” said Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

#A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary $21 trillion of wealth offshore – as much as America and Japan’s GDP combined.

#The poor and middle classes have shouldered by far the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past three years. But the austerity game also has winners: the corporate class, as government services are privatized and savings from austerity pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens.

London gets “Liborated.” Photo: Press TV

#A half-million Americans in 10 states with voter identification laws face serious challenges to obtaining the necessary photo documentation. A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University takes a look at just how hard it can be for someone without a photo ID to get one. The Democratic National Committee and the Ohio Democratic Party have filed a lawsuit over Ohio’s new law that limits in-person early voting for most of the state’s voters three days prior to the election. Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about voter ID laws.

#Our cruel anti-immigrant laws have had a particularly devastating impact on immigrant women and the families they struggle to raise, Forbes reports.

#Eminent domain mortgage seizures, like the ones San Bernardino, California, has been considering, scare Wall Street. Here’s why.

#Police in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco are confiscating condoms from sex workers and transgender women, undermining health department campaigns to reduce HIV.

#The F.D.A. spied on its own scientists’ emails during a whistleblower investigation.

#House Republicans unveiled legislation to get rid of AmeriCorps, the national service program, and cut off federal funding for National Public Radio, public television and Planned Parenthood.

Alexander Schaefer was arrested in LA for chalking the sidewalk with anti-bank messages. Photo: Alexander Schaefer

#Chicago Alderman Joe Moore introduced legislation to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, joining cities and states across the country that are remedying the Court’s poor decision themselves.

#Sheldon Adelson, the big Republican donor who has vowed to bankroll Republican candidates to the tune of $100 million to beat President Obama in November, is being investigated by federal and Nevada investigators for his shady business methods.

#Planned Parenthood Arizona filed a lawsuit against a newly signed law that would prevent Medicaid patients in the state from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health provider because some of its clinics offer abortions.

#The ACLU’s #WannaBeMyDoc tool automatically sends anti-abortion rights lawmakers reproductive health questions.

#It was revealed that George Zimmerman has called Qur’an-burning pastor Terry Jones from jail. Zimmerman told Sean Hannity on Fox News that he has no regrets about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. “I feel it was all God’s plan. For me to second-guess it…” Zimmerman trailed off. The next morning Trayvon’s parents appeared on Today Show, CBS This Morning and Fox & Friends and disputed his statements.”Why would God have him kill an unarmed teenager? I mean, it just makes no sense,” said Sybrina Fulton, Martin’s mother. “What plan is it? I mean, that’s just heartless to say that that was God’s plan that he took our child’s life.” Barbara Walters admitted on The View that in exchange for an interview, Zimmerman and his wife had demanded a month-long stay in a New York hotel with round-the-clock security. Walters, perhaps still stinging from the publicity backlash following her attempt to secure an internship at a major network for an aide to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in exchange for an interview with the homicidal dictator, declined.

#There are 20 mass shootings in the U.S. each year. Here are 10 ways the NRA has weakened gun laws.

#Bill McKibben wrote an incendiary article about global warming in Rolling Stone.

#Skype won’t say whether or not it can eavesdrop on your conversations.

Graphic: LiberationNews.org

#Apple doesn’t want us to know how thoroughly we’re spied on, so it dropped the only app able to detect which apps can access your info.

#The ACLU of Northern California and San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI to find out whether and to what extent the feds have been spying on members of the Occupy Movement.

#Arizona residents are fighting back against the racist sheriff Joe Arpaio.

#According to a new poll, most Americans want Congress to cut the country’s obscene military budget.

#Chris Hayes’s new book “Twilight of the Elites” examines how Wall Street and other major institutions, from Congress to the Catholic Church to Major League Baseball, have been crippled by corruption and incompetence.

#Restoring opportunity in the United States is not terribly complicated, the Christian Science Monitor reported. It will require an activist government, individual responsibility and a strong focus on job creation right now, combined with efforts to reduce debt, improve education and strengthen families over the longer-run.

#George Mason University has begun a project to better understand and report on the consequences of corporatism and cronyism. The research promises to speak to one of the main concerns of both the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements: government favoritism for the privileged.

#Would you watch a reality competition TV show featuring Occupiers facing off against Tea Party members?

#A special report on Kazakhstan airing on CNN includes interviews with “experts” who are actually current or former government employees.

A police officer uses pepper spray on an Amazon Indian man camped several days near the presidential palace to protest a road that President Evo Morales plans to build through a nature reserve. Photo: Juan Karita

#Join Occupy’s creative community and submit your artwork to Occupy Design.

#A new HBO documentary, “Hard Times: Lost on Long Island,” follows four Long Island families who suddenly became poor.

#“Occupy Unmasked” is a Citizens United-produced piece of propaganda exposing the “connection” between Occupy and the “liberal media” that will be shown at the Republican National Convention.

#Jello Biafra wrote an Occupy anthem called “SHOCK-YOU-PY!” Shout along to it, won’t you?

#Occupy the conventions – both of them.

#The July 23 massacre in Aurora, Colorado, horrified the Occupy community just as it did the rest of America. Here’s how you can give.

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Want to report news about your occupation or meetup? Email me at JenSacks77@gmail.com.

This week’s roundup was brought to you in conjunction with Occupy ALL the Updates, curated by citizen journalist SIUKittyPie, and Occupier and journalist Kelli Daley.

Photo: Sunset Parkerpix/Flickr.

On what may be one of the hottest nights of the year, dozens of rent strikers and their families, members of Occupy Sunset Park and supporters will gather for a vigil at 6 p.m. tomorrow in front of 553-46th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to protest the inhumane, unsafe, illegal and deplorable living conditions in the three adjacent buildings owned by one of the city’s worst landlords. The group will then hold a sleep-in on the sidewalk starting at 9 p.m. in front of their sweltering, decrepit buildings, in which the electricity sputters out every 15 minutes.

The following morning, tenants will conduct a people’s inspection of the buildings. Residents have been told by the the Department of Housing and Preservation Deputy Commissioner Vito Mustaciuolo that their landlord, Orazio Petito of Peto Management, has until Thursday to start critical electrical repairs.

For years residents at three adjacent buildings in Sunset Park have been living in fear of fires and electrical blackouts. “No one sleeps much in these three buildings,” Laura Gottesdiener reported on Waging Nonviolence. “In the winter there’s no heat, in the summer there’s no electricity, and all year there are rats and cockroaches scurrying in the walls.” Despite numerous complaints made to city agencies and politicians’ offices, documented housing violations — including unsafe electrical wiring, a broken boiler and disease-triggering agents like mold, vermin and bed bugs — continue to threaten the lives of dozens of residents.

“These three buildings are in danger of fire. We could die!” the banner reads. Photo: OccupyWallSt.org

“I’m living in a nightmare,” Sara Lopez, 64, who lives at 553 46th Street, told the Daily News, adding that she saw sparks shooting out of the fuse box last week. “This building is about to catch fire,” she said.

While many of these violations have persisted for years, the situation became more dire in recent months as the buildings underwent foreclosure. Petito has refused to complete necessary repairs and continues to insist that tenants pay their rent. In the meantime, a cheap plastic fan is being used to keep the basement’s electrical box — which looks like a middle-school science fair project gone horribly wrong — from overheating and catching fire.

In apartments that include a pregnant woman with two children, disabled tenants and individuals with chronic conditions, residents went without heat and hot water during the winter months. Today they face the threat of more blackouts and fear an electrical fire if they use much-needed air conditioning during this season of record-breaking heat. For many residents, waiting weeks for a court order poses an intolerable risk to their lives.

“Do we have to wait for a tragedy before we see action?” Lopez said.

Rent strikers occupy the office of State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz on July 5. Sunset Parkerpix/Flickr

On July 5, the affected tenants and various community members and allies, including members of Occupy Sunset Park and Occupy Wall Street, held a rally to stress the urgency of the repairs. The rally was immediately followed by a march to New York State assemblyman Felix Ortiz’s office. Ortiz was  elected by Sunset Park residents and personally promised Sara and other tenants that he would work to resolve their unsafe housing dilemma. After weeks of no action, the tenants occupied his office and demanded a meeting last Monday. An inspection was promised, but repairs have yet to be made.

Tenants have made it clear that if their demands for immediate repairs are not made, they will consider taking matters into their own hands, utilizing the support from groups like Take Back the Land and Occupy Wall Street to take on the emergency repairs. Such a step would mark the first such tenant mobilization effort in Brooklyn in recent memory.

The 99 Mile March comes home. Photo: Yoni Jakob Brombacher Miller

This week in Occupy, the 99 Mile March rocked its way across two states, the movement survived an NYPD smear campaign, Comic Con got #occupied, and banks continued their usual reprehensible behavior.

#Led by the Occupy Guitarmy, the 99 Mile March arrived in Manhattan via the Staten Island ferry to honor folk singer Woody Guthrie on his 100th birthday. The trek, which began in Pennsylvania on July 5 following the Occupy National Gathering, terminated at Liberty Square, where marchers were greeted by police. At least one was injured and three were arrested in the aftermath.

Occupy Wall Street activists Justin Wedes and Rodney Deas read with students at the Paul Robeson Freedom School in Brooklyn. Photo: Ángel Franco

#After their Hamptons action, the MoneyOut/VotersIn affinity group of Occupy Wall Street released talking points about the Koch Brothers, who were apparently so rattled that they released a set of their own. In them, they call Andy Stephanian, Occupy Wall Street‘s media adviser,  a “convicted terrorist” because he was one of the SHAC 7, which campaigned to shut down a notorious animal testing lab only to be sentenced to Gitmo North.

#The Paul Robeson Freedom School summer camp, started by members of Occupy Wall Street and modeled on civil-rights-era Freedom Schools, was profiled in the New York Times.

#Madeline Nelson described her jail visit with Mark Adams, who has been dubbed Occupy Wall Street’s first political prisoner.

#On July 11, the NYPD announced that DNA recovered from a bicycle chain at the site of a wildcat fare strike in March had been matched with DNA linked to the unsolved killing of Sarah Fox, a Julliard student whose naked body was discovered in Inwood Hill Park in 2004. The story was sensationalized on the New York Post’s front page and in multiple mainstream media outlets. The next day two anonymous sources from the medical examiner’s office told the New York Times that the DNA likely came from a lab worker who worked on both cases. So where were the retractions? A skimpy three-paragraph article buried in the next day’s Post admitted that the link was a lab error, a far cry from the previous day’s cover splash. The lopsided coverage angered members of Occupy Wall Street, who came to suspect the leak was part of an NYPD smear campaign. While it’s certainly true that the NYPD has no love for the city’s activists, police commissioner Ray Kelly also might have publicized an Occupy/murder link to detract from a report two days earlier that he and Mayor Bloomberg overstated the department’s counterterror successes.

The Occupy Guitarmy led the 99 Mile March from Philadelphia to New York. Photo: Stacy Lanyon

#The same day he pushed an Occupy/murder link, Ray Kelly actually said his racist stop-and-frisk policy is for the black and Latino population’s own good. But the policy may hit judicial roadblocks, as recent rulings by federal and state courts have now cast judges as the most potent critics of the practice.

#Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s police department continues enforcing its stop-and-frisk policy, albeit with “legal safeguards.”

#Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter’s ban on feeding the homeless was blocked by a federal judge.

#If Occupy did one thing, the Christian Science Monitor reported, it put the wealth gap in the news, and kept it there.

#“Nobody trusts the system anymore,” Occupy Wall Streeter Alexis Goldstein told Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

#Debt is emerging as a connective thread for Occupy organizers and their allies as they begin to build toward the movement’s one-year anniversary, Truthout opines.

#A California appeals court ruled that police officers may be held liable for injuring someone with a pepper ball projectile intended to disperse a crowd. The decision, which stems from a 2004 incident, is a good sign for the U.C. Davis students doused with pepper spray in November, who have sued university police.

Comic Con: #Occupied. Photo: Russ Burlingame

#Occupy Fresno joined Members of Faith In Community and Peace Fresno to call for a divestment of accounts with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

#In the early hours of July 10, armed SWAT officers burst through the doors of an apartment belonging to organizers of Occupy Seattle as part of an ongoing investigation into the May Day riots. Phillip Neel, one of the residents of the apartment, spoke about the ordeal.

#San Diego Comic Con International staged an Occupy Comics panel on July 15 featuring David Lloyd, Zoetica Ebb, Susie Cagel and other contributors to the Occupy Comics Anthology.

#The LAPD brutalized participants of Chalkwalk, a sidewalk-decorating festival staged by Occupy Los Angeles around the Downtown LA Art Walk to bring attention to the arrests that have been occurring at 626 Wilshire. The police fired rubber bullets at occupiers and non-occupiers alike, arresting 17.

#A federal court awarded $200,000 to an Orlando activist who was imprisoned for 18 days after scribbling “The revolution will not be televised” and “All I want for Christmas is a revolution”  in front of city hall last December.

#An Occupy Eugene member was arrested on July 11 as the group dismantled its latest base at the behest of federal officials who ordered an end to the 10-week demonstration outside the Federal Building. “Brave Beatrice,” a.k.a. Emily Semple, 58, said she never thought she’d want to get arrested. “But this is important,” she said. “There’s no way that I’m not going to stand up for my First Amendment rights.”

Members of Occupy Sun Valley blocked a pathway during a demonstration at the Allen & Company Conference on July 12. Photo: Getty

#Occupy Santa Cruz is back, and the police are right on its heels.

#The Oakland City Council voted unanimously to end its relationship with Goldman Sachs if it did not terminate an interest rate swap deal the city entered into with the investment behemoth back in 1997. If Goldman refuses, the city council will enlist the Stop Goldman Sachs Coalition, a group with members affiliated with Occupy Wall Street.

#Occupy Marin has taken up the cause of a Mill Valley couple who are trying to avoid being evicted from the home they lost to foreclosure. Patricia Goff, 60, was in a serious car accident and has been unable to work, and she and her husband face eviction by Wells Fargo.

#Occupy Wall Street #occupied the Allen and Company retreat for media and tech moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 12, laying down on the sidewalk near the town’s duck pond where Google co-founder Sergey Brin and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were enjoying lunch.

#One week after nearly 700 nurses, nurse assistants and laundry, dietary and housekeeping staff began walking the picket lines at five HealthBridge nursing homes in a strike over unfair labor practices, Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy and Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman came out to join them.

#In a settlement negotiated by the ACLU, Occupy Delaware agreed to temporarily suspend its occupation of Wilmington’s Spencer Plaza in September to make way for a much-needed $1.2 million renovation. The group has maintained the longest-lasting Occupy Wall Street-inspired tent occupation in the nation despite freezing weather, violent storms, blistering heat, the hazards of night and attempts by the city to renege on agreements.

Nurses picketed HealthBridge over unfair labor practices. Photo: 1199NE

#Occupy Tampa met with the West Tampa Community Development Corporation to discuss claims that the encampment in the privately-owned Voice of Freedom Park on Main Street is tarnishing the city’s image. But in fact, some residents said it wasn’t until Occupy Tampa fully inhabited the park seven months ago that they finally felt empowered to use it.

#Occupy Knoxville activist Paul Jacobs penned an editorial in the Knoxville News Sentinel urging his overwhelmingly conservative neighbors to recognize that “we live in a closed system of control, designed so that we find a wall any way we turn,” and “another world is possible.”

#Some of the nation’s largest corporations — General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies and Oracle — cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade while hiring 2.4 million people overseas.

#A federal judge upheld two Springfield, Massachusetts, anti-foreclosure ordinances, ruling against six regional banks that sought to overturn the regulations.

#Major websites and human rights advocates criticized a proposed law that would grant the Russian government broad new powers to restrict online content, supposedly to protect children from pornography and other harmful material. Critics said the law could quickly lead to repression of speech and a restrictive firewall like the one in China.

#A peaceful march in support of the Asturian miners in Madrid led to violence when police evicted the crowd.

A Spanish demonstrator protested against recent austerity measures in Madrid on July 13. Photo: The Sunday News

#Spanish civil servants, many dressed in mourning black, took to the streets July 13 in angry protest as the government approved new sweeping austerity measures that include wage cuts and tax increases for a country struggling under a recession and an unemployment rate of 25 percent.

#To show solidarity with the Occupy Movement, Iran hosted the International Wall Street Downfall Cartoon Festival.

#British austerity has left the elderly and the disabled fearing for their lives.

#A march to protest the declared winner of the July 1 presidential election drew 5,000 to Mexico City on July 14. The protesters – a mix of students, adults and families – marched from the Angel of Independence monument to the Zocalo, Mexico City’s largest plaza.

#Indians braved the rain-slicked streets of Guwahati to protest for rights and protections for women, bolstered by the recent molestation of a young girl and an attack on a female member of the legislative assembly. The culprits remain free in both cases, and the government “has failed miserably” in tackling the issue, an advocate said.

#Radical Islamists in northern Mali briefly detained about 90 protesters and whipped them in an apparent attempt to intimidate the locals.

#Syrian security forces killed 200 people in the town of Tremseh in central Hama province, according to anti-government activists. But Bashar al-Assad’s government is nearing its end, as defections from his inner circle mount.

An entry in the International Wall Street Downfall Cartoon Festival. Image: Mahdi Rozbahani.

#While once estimated to be anywhere from $2 billion to $9 billion, the final cost of JPMorgan Chase’s risky hedge was reported to be $5.8 billion.

#In the wake of the Libor scandal, the Justice Department’s criminal division is building cases against several financial institutions and their employees, including traders at Barclays. The Federal Reserve knew of the rate rigging scandal as far back as 2007 and did nothing to stop it. ZeroHedge illuminated the many ways banks commit criminal fraud.

#HSBC is the latest bank to have laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and terrorists because of its lax controls. Last week, the FBI accused Bank of America of laundering money for Las Zetas.

#Visa, MasterCard and major banks agreed to pay retailers at least $6 billion to settle a long-running lawsuit for conspiring to fix the fees that stores pay to accept credit cards. As part of the settlement, stores from Rite Aid to Kroger will be allowed to charge customers more if they pay using a credit card.

Chalkwalk: #Occupied. Photo: Occupied Stories

#Wells Fargo will pay at least $175 million to settle accusations that it discriminated against African-American and Hispanic borrowers in violation of fair-lending laws.

#A range of Facebook users, from political dissidents to technology bloggers, are reporting the sudden blocking of their pages.

#South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham actually said, “It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” the way Mitt Romney does with his foreign tax shelters.

#The implosion of the subprime lending market has left a scar on the finances of black Americans, one that not only has wiped out a generation of economic progress but could leave them at a financial disadvantage for decades.

#Why does the mainstream media keep perpetuating falsehoods about the ATF’s Fast and Furious operation?

#According to Pew researchers, only half of Americans will exceed their parents’ wealth.

#The next strategic and tactical step in the Medicare For All movement is divestment from private health insurance, TIAA-CREF said.

An estimated 170,000 gathered for an anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo. Photo: The Japan Daily Press

#A new survey by law firm Labaton Sucharow LLP, which looks to work with potential whistleblowers to help SEC investigations, found 26% of financial employees in the U.S. and U.K. surveyed had firsthand knowledge of “wrongdoing in the workplace.” 16% of those surveyed said they would engage in insider trading if they could make $10 million and not get caught, and 24% believed rules “may have to be broken in order to be successful.”

#In a misguided solution to the threat of voter disenfranchisement in Florida, the Department of Homeland Security has granted state election officials access to a database of noncitizen residents for use in Republican-backed efforts to remove people who are not American citizens from voter registration rolls. The decision came after efforts by the Obama administration to block access.

#Number-cruncher Nate Silver attempts to derive whether voter identification laws depress turnout.

#ProPublica curated the best reporting on detention and rendition under Obama.

Bangladeshi garment workers marched to express solidarity with the striking miners of Spain. Photo: Occupy San Francisco

#Occupy the Film Festival will bring together the most compelling and innovative films of the movement on September 15 at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

#Occupy groups from Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Portland, Sebastopol and Petaluma are joining twenty other social justice activist organizations to protest the powerful 1% elites partying at the secretive Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California, from July 14 to 29.

#According to Occupy Arrests, there have been 7,360 arrests in 116 cities since September 17.

Want to report news about your occupation or meetup? Email me at JenSacks77@gmail.com.

This week’s roundup was brought to you in conjunction with Occupy ALL the Updates, curated by citizen journalist SIUKittyPie, and Occupier and journalist Kelli Daley.

If the United States’ largest bank, Chase, and its 18^th largest corporation, CVS Pharmacy, are permitted to anchor themselves at the center of town, as they propose, it would hurt my farm and other local businesses. This would damage our town and our semi-rural county of nearly 500,000 people.

Fortunately, Sebastopol’s Design Review Board has rejected the Chase/CVS development several times, the latest being by a 4 to 1 vote in June. It will now go before the City Council on July 17. Chase and CVS have substantial global power, so they are working behind the scenes to get what they want — more money. They employ various tactics against local businesses and officials. The corner they covet is the most valuable in our town currently on the market.

Chase Bank, which is part of JP Morgan, and its CEO Jamie Dimon have recently received bad publicity for gambling with derivatives and losing $5.8 billion. They have a long history of paying millions in fines for illegal, fraudulent and predatory banking practices. Many consider them loan sharks. Fortunately for us, we have good alternatives because we have many credit unions and local banks in Sebastopol. They deserve our business, which strengthens the local economy.

CVS has also been found guilty and fined millions for criminal practices, including the failure to cleanup toxic materials. The white collar criminal top managers of Chase and CVS should be in jail. They are not there because — like previous robber barons — they have high-paid lawyers, lobbyists and politicians who make the laws that are supposed to regulate them.

Corporations have captured the federal government and even judges, especially the U.S. Supreme Court. Big corporations have successfully concentrated their power in many industries, including financial, pharmaceutical, agribusiness and nuclear energy. They anchor the wealthy 1% and oppress the 99% of people.

Small-town Sebastopol, CA, pop. 7,379.

CVS utilizes devious ways of depriving local pharmacies of customers. According to GoLocal’s Philip Beard, “My local druggist at Tuttle’s Pharmacy in Santa Rosa has lost a sizable portion of his clientele. All County workers are now covered by a recently adopted County group healthcare policy. The policy only pays for prescribed drugs if they’re bought at CVS.”

Beard added, “So Tuttle’s, a longtime locally owned Sonoma County business that’s paid beaucoup bucks in taxes over the years, is cheated out of a significant part of business because the County — ostensibly to help its employees cover their healthcare needs — awards an exclusive contract to a corporate giant that would like Tuttle’s to go out of business. The people who work there would lose their jobs.”

The owner of another local pharmacy in the West County confirmed the same information. It is losing customers because of the mandatory mail order purchasing of medicine only through CVS. “This model is not a best practice for patients,” he observed. “CVS does not care. Medical outcomes are best when done with face-to-face interaction with the pharmacist. Yet most of the county is going to such mail-orders.”

My small business was damaged when a big supermarket chain bought a small, local business. For many years Sebastopol’s Food for Thought was the main purchaser of my berries. I could supply them the quantity they needed at their one store. But once Texas-based Whole Foods bought them, they wanted me to supply berries for all their regional stores. Since I was unable to do that, they began purchasing their berries from big businesses located outside Sonoma County. So instead of the money from the financial exchange continuing to circulate among the people within Sonoma County, it now goes to Texas and elsewhere. Studies document that the average morsel of food in the U.S. travels 1,500 miles from field to fork to be eaten. This consumes a huge amount of fossil fuels, which are declining in supply and should be preserved for essential uses.

Fortunately for my business, Laguna Farm has continued to purchase my berries to supply its Community Supported (CSA) customers; I also sell them directly to customers who come to Kokopelli Farm. Another favorable recent development for local growers has been the growth of Terra Sonoma into the Farmers Exchange of Earthly Delights (FEED). It buys directly from local farmers and distributes throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Its motto is “Feeding you Locally since 1979.” The word “locavore,” which means to source one’s food locally, was invented in Sonoma County, and recently was named the Oxford Dictionary’s new word of the year.

The Spiral Foods Coop has been hard at work organizing and already has hundreds of members, which will give residents more local food options. We need more such cooperatives and fewer huge corporations.

“One person, one vote” is an American tradition. However, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s misnamed “Citizens United” decision declaring that corporations are people has deprived us of that tradition. The way it now works is that one giant corporation can give millions of dollars to candidates and elected officials and thus buy their votes. This includes Supreme Court judges, resulting in the current U.S. Supreme Court having the lowest percentage of confidence by the American people of any court in U.S. history.

If the Sebastopol City Council upholds the Design Review Board’s rejection of the Chase/CVS development, it would benefit the small businesses and people of the West County. If it permits that development, it would ensure a protracted struggle by those of us who love the small town character of Sebastopol, which Chase/CVS would undermine.

The differences between big chains like Chase and CVS and small businesses like Kokopelli Farm and Tuttle’s are essential. Local businesses like ours are what differentiates and puts our small town of Sebastopol on the map as a local, go-to community with character.

Shepherd Bliss operates the artisan Kokopelli Farm, teaches college and can be reached at 3sb@comcast.net.

The fall of the Bastille.

“Après moi, le deluge.”

Little could King Louis XV have predicted that his unfortunate grandson, the enlightened and well-intentioned but indecisive Louis XVI, would succumb to a guillotine after two expensive wars, national bankruptcy, and a revolution. Why does the French Revolution still resonate today and what can we learn?

Then, as now in America, French society was quite literally divided between the 1% and 99%, with the clergy and nobility belonging to the 1% (or thereabouts) and everyone else – from beggars to bankers – to the 99%. Then, as now, wealth was concentrated disproportionately on top, as the nobility owned a whopping 33% of the land and sizable amounts of government stock. Not only did they exact seigneurial dues from their communities but they also paid no direct taxes. Even less well-off nobles did better than most, including the French Paris Hiltons of the day who had “no taste for reading…nor indeed any occupation, but that of dressing their hair and adorning their bodies,” as Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett commented. Plus ça change!

At the other end of the social spectrum, nearly 50% were underemployed or impoverished. Then, as now, those slightly better off felt the perpetual risk of sinking into destitution especially during a bad harvest. The fact that prices rose considerably faster than wages didn’t help either. As one inspector of manufactures observed in 1777, “Workmen today need twice as much money for their subsistence, yet they earn no more than fifty years ago when living was half as cheap.”

This period image illustrates the power of the Third Estate.

More striking still are the parallels between ideas for reform now and then, as recorded in the cahiers de doléances of spring 1789, an early government survey of public grievances. If laborers and shopkeepers demanded more stringent trade regulations, peasants exhorted nobles to control the dirty effluent flowing from their mines. Many resented being treated “like slaves.” In turn, the middling orders desired “careers open to talents,” encouragement of enterprise, and an end to noble privileges. As for the nobility, they predictably sought a reinforcement of privileges and tax exemptions: after all, because their great-great-great-etc. grandfather fought in the wars, only commoners, i.e., the “little people,” should pay taxes. And much like billionaire Mitt Romney supporter and hedge-funder Ken Griffin, they also believed that the 1% deserved even greater political influence. Altogether, 18th-century France was a world where “the distance which separates the rich from other citizens is growing daily. Hatred grows more bitter and the state is divided into two classes: the greedy and insensitive, and murmuring malcontents.”

And the times certainly were a-changin.’ Not unlike Dylan in the 1960s, French writers and critics of the 1760s were already prophesizing with their pens, vindicating the 99%. The notorious atheist Baron d’Holbach (a frenemy of Voltaire) presciently observed that “bad laws are those that have as their object the welfare, the preservation, and the security of only a few members, at the expense of the rest of society.” Anyway, weren’t “laborers” and “intellectuals” more useful to society than “opulent imbeciles?” Fellow radical Diderot broadly anticipated Marx and Engels, calling for “downtrodden people of the world” to “rise up against their oppressors!” Not least, a near-viral stream of anti-aristocratic, anti-monarchical and anti-clerical pamphlets in the 1770s and ‘80s would stoke popular hostility, leading the chancellor of the French judiciary to dread a “revolution in ideas.”And erupt it did – particularly after Louis XVI failed to stave off national bankruptcy during a three-year battle over taxes on the 1%. For spectators around the world, the early stages of the revolution were nothing short of sublime – much like the Arab Spring and the worldwide Occupy Movement. Wordsworth cried, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” while George Washington declared it to be “of so wonderful a nature.”

Indeed, the collective cooperation and unity amazed many, beginning with the spirited popular support for the representatives of the Third Estate and the creation of a new National Assembly – not to mention the diverse crowd that protested Louis XVI’s unexpected dismissal of the well-liked minister Jacques Necker before storming the Bastille. Or the crowd of 7,000 women that forced their way into the National Assembly a few months later, demanding a resolution on bread prices and renewed support of the revolution. Even more impressive today are the laws passed between 1789 and 1793, before the onslaught of The Directory and Napoleon: slavery was abolished, homosexuality decriminalized (unlike in Britain) and property qualifications for suffrage eradicated. Severe penalties were to be introduced for wife-beating and procedures for spousal separation and divorce facilitated. Interestingly, however, women would not attain suffrage despite their considerable role in the revolution: perhaps because Robespierre had found himself too intimidated at a meeting of the Revolutionary Republican Citizenesses.

It is, of course, unfortunate that the revolution came to be tarred by excessive brutality. However, let’s not forget that the 18th-century world was a far more violent one than our own and that Louis XVI himself had only just abolished some of the most spectacular punishments in 1788: including drawing and quartering, breaking on the wheel and public burnings. Yet even then, mobs refrained from indiscriminate violence on their “betters,” choosing only to target the most egregious: for instance, the lord who imprisoned an 85-year-old woman for stealing a loaf of bread. Or Necker’s ministerial replacement, Foulon, for purportedly hoarding grains and quipping, “If the poor are hungry, they should eat straw.” (As a finishing touch, straw was stuffed into his mouth after a beating and execution.)

Less justifiable are the persecutions conducted by the Jacobin government even when violent threats from royalists and counterrevolutionaries are accounted for. Far from embracing a democratic ethos, Robespierre and his inner circle replicated an absolutist, hierarchical ancien-régime paradigm of authority: one all too evident from his rejection of Girondins and radical women. Ultimately, then, the tragedy of the revolution was not that it went too far–but not far enough.

But for all that, the French revolution continues to teach and inspire us, as it has for countless others. Certainly the French have learned, as they enjoy greater social mobility and job security than many others – including Americans. Perhaps we’ll learn to rethink entitlement in our day and age, whether in the form of rampant grade inflation at elite universities or bloated CEO compensation. Learn to shift tax burdens. Learn inclusiveness by listening to others and eschewing vertical, authoritarian paradigms for more egalitarian ones: in short, learn to embrace the principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité all the way. Vive L’Occupy Worldwide!

Frances A. Chiu earned her doctorate at Oxford University and is an assistant professor at The New School.

Photo: MillionsAgainstMonsanto

While many Americans were firing up barbecues and breaking out the sparklers to celebrate Independence Day, biotech industry executives were more likely chilling champagne to celebrate another kind of independence: immunity from federal law.

A so-called “Monsanto rider,” quietly slipped into the multi-billion dollar FY 2013 Agricultural Appropriations bill, would require – not just allow, but require - the Secretary of Agriculture to grant a temporary permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, even if a federal court has ordered the planting be halted until an Environmental Impact Statement is completed. All the farmer or the biotech producer has to do is ask, and the questionable crops could be released into the environment where they could potentially contaminate conventional or organic crops and, ultimately, the nation’s food supply.

Unless the Senate or a citizen’s army of farmers and consumers can stop them, the House of Representatives is likely to ram this dangerous rider through any day now.

In a statement issued last month, the Center For Food Safety had this to say about the biotech industry’s latest attempt to circumvent legal and regulatory safeguards:

Ceding broad and unprecedented powers to industry, the rider poses a direct threat to the authority of U.S. courts, jettisons the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) established oversight powers on key agriculture issues and puts the nation’s farmers and food supply at risk.

In other words, if this single line in the 90-page Agricultural Appropriations bill slips through, it’s Independence Day for the biotech industry.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) has sponsored an amendment to kill the rider, whose official name is “the farmers assurance” provision. But even if DeFazio’s amendment makes it through the House vote, it still has to survive the Senate. Meanwhile, organizations like the Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, FoodDemocracyNow!, the Alliance for Natural Health USA and many others are gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures in protest of the rider, and in support of DeFazio’s amendment.

Will Congress do the right thing and keep what are arguably already-weak safeguards in place, to protect farmers and the environment? Or will industry win yet another fight in the battle to exert total control over our farms and food supply?

Biotech’s ‘Legislator of the Year’ behind the latest sneak attack

Whom do we have to thank for this sneak attack on USDA safeguards? The agricultural sub-committee chair Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) – who not coincidentally was voted “legislator of the year for 2011-2012″ by none other than the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto and DuPont. As reported by Mother Jones, the Biotechnology Industry Organization declared Kingston a “champion of America’s biotechnology industry” who has “helped to protect funding for programs essential to the survival of biotechnology companies across the United States.”

Kingston clearly isn’t interested in the survival of America’s farmers.

Aiding and abetting Kingston is John C. Greenwood, former US Congressman from Pennsylvania and now president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. No stranger to the inner workings of Congress, Greenwood lobbied for the “farmers assurance provision” in a June 13 letter to Congress, according to Mother Jones and Bloomberg, claiming that “a stream of lawsuits” have slowed approvals and “created uncertainties” for companies developing GE crops.

Greenwood was no doubt referring to several past lawsuits, including one brought in 2007 by the Center for Food safety challenging the legality of the USDA’s approval of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa. In that case, a federal court ruled that the USDA’s approval of GMO alfalfa violated environmental laws by failing to analyze risks such as the contamination of conventional and organic alfalfa, the evolution of glyphosate-resistant weeds, and increased use of Roundup.  The USDA was forced to undertake a four-year study of GMO alfalfa’s impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). During the four-year study, farmers were banned from planting or selling the crop – creating that ‘uncertainty” that Greenwood is so worried about.

The USDA study slowed down the release of GMO alfalfa, but ultimately couldn’t stop it. As Mother Jones reports, in 2011, the USDA deregulated the crop, even though according to its own study, the USDA said that “gene flow” between GM and non-GM alfalfa is “probable,” and threatens organic dairy producers and other users of non-GMO alfalfa, and that there is strong potential for the creation of Roundup-resistant “superweeds” that require ever-higher doses of Roundup and application of ever-more toxic herbicides. The report noted that two million acres of US farmland already harbor Roundup-resistant weeds caused by other Roundup Ready crops.

In another case – which perhaps paved the way for this latest provision now before the House – the USDA in 2011 outright defied a federal judge’s order to halt the planting of Monsanto’s controversial Roundup-Ready GMO sugar beets until it completed an Environmental Impact Statement. The USDA allowed farmers to continue planting the crop even while it was being assessed for safety on the grounds that there were no longer enough non-GMO seeds available to plant.

Who loses if Monsanto wins this one?

Photo: MillionsAgainstMonsanto

Among the biggest losers if Congress ignores the DeFazio amendment and passes the “farmers assurance provision” are thousands of farmers of conventional and organic crops, including those who rely on the export market for their livelihoods. An increasing number of global markets are requiring GMO-free agricultural products or, at the very least, enforcing strict GMO labeling laws. If this provision passes, it will allow unrestricted planting of potentially dangerous crops, exposing other safe and non-GMO crops to risk of contamination.

As we’ve seen in the past, farmers who grow crops that have been inadequately tested and later found dangerous, or whose safe crops become contaminated by nearby unsafe crops, risk huge losses and potentially, lawsuits from their customers. Ultimately, the entire US agriculture market and US economy suffers.

We have only to look back to the StarLink corn and LibertyLink rice contamination episodes for evidence of how misguided this provision is. In October 2000, traces of an Aventis GM corn called StarLink showed up in taco shells in the U.S. even though the corn had not been approved for human consumption because leading allergists were concerned it would cause food allergies. The contamination led to a massive billion dollar recall of over 300 food brands. The ‘StarLink’ gene also turned up unexpectedly in a second company’s corn and in US corn exports, causing a costly disruption to the nation’s grain-handling system, and spurring lawsuits by farmers whose crops were damaged.

A similar disaster occurred for US rice farmers in 2006. In august of that year the USDA announced that mutant DNA of Liberty Link, a genetically modified variety of rice developed by Bayer CropScience, a then-German agri-business giant, were found in commercially-grown long-grain rice in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri. LibertyLink rice, named for Bayer’s broad-spectrum herbicide glufosinate-ammonium, was never intended for human consumption. Following the announcement of contamination, Japan banned all long-grain rice imports from the U.S., and U.S. trade with the EU and other countries ground to a halt.  Rice farmers and cooperatives were forced to engage in five long years of litigation against Bayer

CropScience in an attempt to recoup some of their losses.

All the other ways this provision is just plain bad

There’s a reason we have laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Plant Protection Act of 2000, which was specifically designed “to strengthen the safety net for agricultural producers by providing greater access to more affordable risk management tools and improved protection from production and income loss . . .”. The ‘farmers assurance provision” is a thinly disguised attempt by the biotech industry to undermine these protections. Worse yet, it’s an affront to everyone who believes the US judicial system exists to protect US citizens and public health.

Why should you be outraged about this provision? For all these reasons:

·      The Monsanto Rider is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Judicial review is an essential element of U.S. law, providing a critical and impartial check on government decisions that may negatively impact human health, the environment or livelihoods. Maintaining the clear-cut boundary of a Constitutionally-guaranteed separation of powers is essential to our government. This provision will blur that line.

·      Judicial review is a gateway, not a roadblock. Congress should be fully supportive of our nation’s independent judiciary. The ability of courts to review, evaluate and judge an issue that impacts public and environmental health is a strength, not a weakness, of our system. The loss of this fundamental safeguard could leave public health, the environment and livelihoods at risk.

Photo: MillionsAgainstMonsanto

·      It removes the “legal brakes” that prevent fraud and abuse. In recent years, federal courts have ruled that several USDA GE crop approvals violated the law and required further study of their health and environmental impact. These judgments indicated that continued planting would cause harm to the environment and/or farmers and ordered interim planting restrictions pending further USDA analysis and consideration. The Monsanto rider would prevent a federal court from putting in place court-ordered restrictions, even if the approval were fraudulent or involved bribery.

·      It’s unnecessary and duplicative. Every court dealing with these issues is supposed to carefully weigh the interests of all affected farmers and consumers, as is already required by law. No farmer has ever had his or her crops destroyed as a result. USDA already has working mechanisms in place to allow partial approvals, and the Department has used them, making this provision completely unnecessary.

·      It shuts out the USDA. The rider would not merely allow, it would compel the Secretary of Agriculture to immediately grant any requests for permits to allow continued planting and commercialization of an unlawfully approved GE crop. With this provision in place, USDA may not be able to prevent costly contamination episodes like Starlink or Liberty Link rice, which have already cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. The rider would also make a mockery of USDA’s legally mandated review, transforming it into a ‘rubber stamp’ approval process.

·      It’s a back-door amendment of a statute. This rider, quietly tacked onto an appropriations bill, is in effect a substantial amendment to USDA’s governing statute for GE crops, the Plant Protection Act. If Congress feels the law needs to be changed, it should be done in a transparent manner by holding hearings, soliciting expert testimony and including full opportunity for public debate.

If we allow this “Monsanto Rider” to be slipped into the FY 2013 Agricultural Appropriations bill, consumers and farmers will lose what little control we have now over what we plant and what we eat.

If you would like to join the hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens who have already written to Congress in support of the DeFazio amendment, please sign our petition here.

Alexis Baden-Mayer is political director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association. Cummins is author of numerous articles and books, including “Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers.”

This originally appeared on Reader-Supported News.