Info for 1st Anniversery of Occupy

Here's a list of links and information for the 1st Anniversary weekend of Occupy Wall Street.

Main event website and schedule are at  http://s17nyc.org/schedule/

There's some housing lined up. Factory space in Brookyln has been secured as temporary housing, folks can get location if they sign up to go at:  http://s17nyc.org/support/registration/ 

Good overall event summary is at these sites:

http://interoccupy.net/s17nyc/s17-everything-you-need-to-know-update-important-info-share-widely/

 http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/September_17th_NYC

Musical events are being organized by the Guitarmy.  Check out  http://www.guitarmy.org/   where you'll find a catchy updated 99% version of the miner classic "which side are you on?"

On Sunday morning Sept 16th, the Guitarmy brings it's music to the site of hydro-fracked gas entering the city. At 10 a.m. folks start gathering and at noon march from the Spectra Site to Foley Square to take part in the Occupy Anniversary Concert in Foley Square. Spectra Energy Pipeline Blast Zone is located at Gansvoort Street and West Street (the West Side highway), L/A train to 8th Avenue.

The Guitarmy is also organizing on Sunday S17 to do music pop-ups around the city, gathering to play music on 99 streetcorners around the city.  Info at http://99corners.tumblr.com/  A pre-game rehersal for this event will happpen on Saturday 15th 6pm, with song teach-in and rehearsal social justice songs together at Washington Square Park. 

In the spirit of participatory democracy,  the Guitarmy website asks "Want to be part of the opening and closing act, aka the occupy guitarmy?" Learn these songs: Which side are you on, This land is your land, Wall Street your kingdom must come down, and "Frack You" Cee Lo parody

occupy guitarmy press release for event at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jNAI7rI32YQNDXbXZgex_1K1OPqTftrLJErbWYV28oA/edit?pli=1

twitter tags to checkout are 

 #spectrashdown @owsguitarmy @owsmusicgroup

S17 has a Facebook page  https://www.facebook.com/events/407471409305638/

Resist the Fracking of NY's Water Supply and Your Future!

The Oil Companies are starting to wreck America's water supply with Hydro-fracking for "Natural Gas".  So let's face this fact: we live in a dark time. Terrible things are happening, things that future generations will cuss us out for.  We live when the ecological world that supports human life is being taken away from us. One way to resist our immoral era is to bear witness and say clearly "We are not fooled. We see what's happening. This must be stopped."  This essay seeks to bear witness to the evils of Hydrofracking and to encourage New York state to stay fracking free.

Hydro-fracking is the nickname for hydraulic fracturing, a process invented by those Titans of Massive Industrialism at Halliburton.  In essence, they explode one of the Earth's bottom floors to release 'Natural Gas" and siphon it off with wells.  The process is fiercely complicated, and involves millions of gallons of fresh water and toxic chemicals pushed into the Earth at extremely high pressure.  Fracking is like a marriage between a PhD professor in Geology and Dick Cheney: advanced geological information combined with amoral cruel pragmatic self-interest.  In fact, Cheney helped pass the "Halliburton Loophole" that allows frackers exemptions from the Clean Water Act. 

CBS News reports that Gov. Cuomo is preparing to allow Fracking in south-west New York. Fracking has been on-hold in NY for four years, and perhaps with political pressure, luck and God's grace, fracking will continue to be kept out. But money talks and the Extreme Energy companies have a lot of ca$h to throw at politician$.  Money buys propaganda like CNN's relentless 'Natural Gas' ads. Yet some people aren't fooled. This weekend, there was a massive rally in Albany by a group called Don't Frack With NY, where environmental groups and college kids made commitments to resist NY's fracking with non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.

Fracking's main problem is the wells leak.  The local ground water gets contaminated by the natural gas, the polluted water, and radioactivity.  The fracking industry claims to surround and seal the well with a solid concrete tube to protect leaking into the groundwater. Yes, let's fantasize...  imagine trying to pour concrete a mile down a hole where giant rocks are under intense pressure.  And then the concrete lasts FOREVER and protects the water for generations to come. That is delusion, a pretend design for a well, not a possible future.  Safe fracking is impossible.  

Even the oil companies admit to themselves they can't keep the wells from leaking.  In the new on-line film, The Sky Is Pink, activist/filmmaker Josh Fox shows the documents where companies admit that it's impossible to make permanent well casing to protect the water.  Fox made the film "Gasland"

which famously shows a man lighting his water on fire as it comes out of his tap.

Fracking is a sociopathic ruining of the Earth for short-term corporate profit.  It's only happening because of corporate/goverment collusion amidst a hurricane of money that buys politicians and a Nazi-like propaganda campaign that would make Gobbels jealous.  The GOP convention is tagged with the logo "America's Natural Gas" everywhere, from commercials to the front of Politico's pundits desk.  

  

Hydro-fracking is a very 21st century problem. Humanity has a lot of technical knowledge but not everyone is restrained by wisdom. Halliburton knows how to explode Mother Earth's bones and sniff the fumes, like half-bright boys playing with frogs and firecrackers. Somehow we humans must make these corporations behave in a way capatible with human survival.   

Hydro-fracking is so bad, so immoral that it deserves judgemental old-school Old Testament language to describe it: Evil, Abomination and Sin.  We cannot properly name the wickedness that's afoot with this project without all the fierce moralistic language of the past.  These words have become toxic through misuse in the cultural wars of late, but we need them to describe fracking.  Hydro-fracking is an Abomination, a grave Sin that anyone who encourages or takes part in will have to answer for when they meet their Maker.  Where's Elijah when you need him to talk about CNN's incessent "natural gas" ads?

Humanity is facing "the end of the world", or at least, the end of humanity, because the Corporations are more powerful than humans, they squish us like bugs, steal our water supplies, deny us a realistic response to the Climate Crisis. We are not, in any real way, planning for long-term human survival on this delicate Earth and that is stupid and wrong! We must organize like the Lilliputians and tie down Gulliver. We must save humanity and this Earth.  It's taken so much energy to get humanity here, we owe it to our honorable ancestors to not blow it now.    

Fracking will be the most environmentally contentious issue of coming decades.  Evidence of polluted water supplies will pile up. Then politicians who helped frack the water will be cast into the Lake of Getting Fired. If Gov. Cuomo fracks NY, he'll lose the political dynasty. 

Please write Governor Cuomo and tell him to keep NY un-fracked. Encourage your legislators to pass laws like Vermont's which outlaw hydrofracking.  Join the struggle to save Mother Earth from this cruel, blind system that is taking us towards extinction.  Join the effort to help humanity win a livable future. 

Let's Converge on Burlington, Occupy the Pipeline!

Please come to Burlington the weekend of July 29-31 for the biggest environmental protest Vermont has seen in years.  Activists are planning to "Converge on the Conference!"   On Sunday 2 p.m, we'll wear all black and make a human oil spill to symbolically say NO! to a Tar Sands Pipeline going thru New England. This weekend is a great opportunity to meet-up and say to the governors "we'll un-elect you unless you act on the Climate Crisis! And that means, no pipeline."

The Conference of New England Governors and Canadian Premiers meets at the Hilton Hotel above the waterfront in Burlington. Among the topics to be discussed is the Tar Sands pipeline that would run through most of these territories.  

Now, why bother the Governors, tastefully meeting behind close doors to promote economic growth and bureocratic interbreeding? Because it's become a very successful organizing tactic to OCCUPY outside the doors of the rich and powerful as they gamble away our future. Occupying is irritating to the Elite. It is rude to occupy their doorsteps with scruffy sleeping bags and sincere concern for our dying planet. It shines light upon the on-the-downlow business-as-usual destroying of Mother Earth.

For example, we need LIGHT upon the Trailbreaker pipeline.  The Titans of Big Oil want to fix-up a 1950's pipeline that runs from the Tar Sands of Alberta to the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, thru Montreal, through 30 miles of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and onward to Maine. (Good idea, boys. While yer at it, fix up an old Model T to keep an eye out for leaks!) 

Citizen's groups are stepping up to say "No Way!" 350Vermont.org has been leading VT's disobedience to Corporate Craziness.  Check out this photo pile of recent action touring the proposed pipeline route: http://world.350.org/vermont/take-a-virtual-tour-of-pipeline-corridor-in-northeast-kingdom/  People are organizing regionally at http://www.tarsandsfreene.org/   Schedule for Convergence at http://www.btvconvergence.net/wordpress/ 

For fun, check out this lovely, in-french video from some Quebeckies coming down to be in Solidarite: http://youtu.be/YDB9YOiyClM

After the Human Oil Spill at 2pm, the Occupy New England Regional Gathering will happen at 4 p.m. In the evening,  the U.U. Church is hosting a dinner and a teach-in about many issues related to the Conference.  Bread and Puppet Theater performs Monday at 11:30 near the Hilton.

Be there or Be pipelined.

Encouraging travel details for Occupy National Gathering

A friend on-site says the Occupy National Gathering is off to good start, "peaceful chill scene at encampment in Quaker Church parking lot, 500-700 folks, need more bodies, come on down, people!"  There's a full schedule of teach-ins by day on Independence Mall. Later in week, folks may try camping in front of some local banks. Philly cops reputed to be generally cool, but yesterday cop dickishness at intersection leads to 30 arrests. Dem mayor denying water access to encampment from fire hydrants, maybe trying to protect Occupiers from Philly's water supply. But by and large, it's a safe campout in the limelight. People should come down and be in support. Bring a tent if you've got one, a sleeping pad perhaps, or book a hotel room.  Yeah, let's travel to camp in a parking lot in Philly during a record breaking heatwave. Why? Because Occupy stands for cool things, like direct democracy and saving our planet from hydrofrackers. Because if we don't stop climate change is going to get 10 times this hot. Because Novelty in a dreary political time is good. 

more info:

http://www.occupynationalgathering.com/#

the Quaker Church camping is two blocks off Independence Mall at 4th and Arch Street at http://www.archstreetfriends.org/  

good articles:

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/2321/399/Occupy_National_Gathering_Update.html

workshop times:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/occupy-philadelphia/schedule-and-announcements-for-monday-july-2/245456635557211

Is this it? Humanity, come on!  We can do better than this.  We can morph into an enlightened species, complete with healthy food/fuel and fun, and hey, why not?  We can manifest ECOTOPIA.

watch this and save the planet

XL pipeline = human extinction

If we don't stop Climate Change, we'll break the sky and humans will go extinct. That is what the science says. Runaway Climate Change means planet death. If one hasn't had a terrifying vision of human extinction from runaway Climate Change, one doesn't understand the science.

Climate activists have been reluctant to motivate people with grim visions of planet death, lest they get too depressed to get involved. Climate scientists tend to talk in sleep-inducing language that doesn't convey the emergency. We've been under-scaring the children. I understand not wanting to infect people with terribly sad visions of everything you love and care about dying. It's wicked sad that Humanity is on a doom course. Staring at these grim realities should make you weep occasionally like a little child. I understand folks wanting to live the culture of Make Believe and pretend it's the 1950's and America will still be awesome if we only stick with what's worked, so "Somebody put on a Kingston Trio record and let's get this party re-started!" But that's the past. Today is 2012 and we live in the Era of Climate Crisis and Vermont has no snow and last summer we had a hurricane!

The Keystone XL pipeline is a product of this ahistorical fantasy culture. Un-constrained by history, science or common sense, the radical oily corporationists want to build the biggest industrial project on the planet to painfully extract oil that we need to leave in the ground to survive as a species! Fossil fuel company executives should be seen as backwards, radical, extreme energy fundamentalist terrorists. If Exxon Mobil executives had beards, turbans and an unpopular religion, our society wouldn't have given them 9.4 billion dollars last quarter, but rather, we'd be ordering drone strikes in Dallas! These same oily terrorists are plotting to ruin America's water supply in the next decade with hydro-fracking.

Tar Sands oil requires 4 barrels of water to produce on barrel of oil. Native peoples of Alberta report that their lakes are dropping and people are getting cancer from contaminated ground water. People get run over by the massive industrial trucks clogging their country roads. Alberta is like a real life version of Pandora from the movie Avatar. The human costs is so high, and yet these sociopathic corporations put all these costs down as 'externalities' while winning all the poker chips for themselves. There is a touch of evil on the Tars Sands XL pipeline project, a heartless diabolic cruelty to the Earth and poor people.

Our society is spiraling towards a new morality and Law based on the truth of the Climate Crisis. Tim DeChristopher, Bidder 70.org, in jail now for disrupting an oil lease auction, should be seen as a hero for pushing on the Law to catch up to Climate science. There are growing calls for an International Climate Justice Tribunal, modeled after Bertrand Russell's International War Crimes Tribunal. These citizen processes prepare the way for full legal proceedings, and hopefully someday we'll see the Koch brothers at the Hague's International Criminal Court.

Soon, when humanity finally realizes how serious a pickle we're in, there will be a demand for justice and a call for heads on a plate. In 10 years, a history of advocacy on Climate will make you look like Nostradamus. And in 20 years, obstructionism in dealing with Climate will be a crime worthy of retro-active punishment. Government people who take money from the American Petroleum Institute in 2012 will someday have to answer for it in court. I look forward to the day when TransCanada's executives are afraid to go to Spain for fear of arrest.

Media people called Tar Sands protesters "environmental radicals" which got Bill McKibben asking "who are the radicals here?" The people who came to the protests were the kind of radicals who talk about Gandhi, eat organic and sing "This Little Light of Mine". The real radicals are the oil companies who are changing the chemical composition of the planet in a real time experiment on all of us, like nazi planet doctors. Que the Nazi accent: "Ya, ve have seen what happens when we break a bone 15 times in the same spot on gypsy prisoners. Now, the Reich will use it's technological prowess to make sky warmer so that the Homeland has climate as pleasant as Jamaica."

The Keystone XL pipeline and the Tar Sands are an immoral, ahistorical, radical experiment in Extreme Energy. Tar Sands mining is the ugliest, earth-hating kind of industrialism. They want to scrape off the skin of Mother Earth on an area the size of the Britain. Then they want to build nuclear power plants to heat the oil out of the sand. Then they want to ship it across the continent over the Agualla Aquifer, then sell it to China. Pure unhinged sociopathic Wall Street boardroom madness without a whiff of ecological literacy.

Please help get the US government off the teet of Big Oil. Please help advance laws that reflect the reality of the Climate Crisis. Please stand against the XL pipeline and the Tar Sands.

Stop "Smartmeters" for health and privacy

In this era of Climate Crisis, I loathe to argue against anything that might cut carbon, but the "Smartmeter" project is such a stinker on so many levels that I'm obliged. To summarize the problems: electro-smog pollution, corporate surveillance, propping up for Utility-based electrical distribution, (which by design don't really want to cut usage and therefore profits), undemocratic corporate pushiness, privacy and security for homeowners, and more.

Smartmeters have already been installed in California, creating so many problems that 40 towns to pass resolutions banning them. In Vermont, Central Vermont Power Service (CVPS) is rolling out a project to replace electric meters with so-called "Smartmeters" that essentially have a cellphone inside them communicating to cell-towers and creating an electric + information grid. CVPS says this will cut usage, create the infrastructure to support electric cars, and give the utility tools to manage the grid. The Federal Gov't set aside $69 million in Stimulus money for VT's smartmeter project, if they spend it before April 2013. I love that the government is trying to do big things for the environment and investing in technologies to cut carbon. But... with this project, the devil is in the details.

Smartmeters create security and privacy issues for the homeowner. It will be an easy system for computer hackers to get into, and then have detailed information about when you are home or not. And it will create a data trove that companies can "data mine".

This sounds sci-fi, but this is actually in the primary design of the system. Each electrical appliance emits a unique electronic signature, and the Utilities (+ whoever hacks it eventually) will know if/when you turn on your dishwasher, baby monitor, vibrator, and so forth. This electrical signature surveillance is currently being used against marijuana growers, so this isn't hypothetical. One could argue that Smartmeters are unconstitutional because the Bill of Rights says we have a right to privacy in our homes and in our papers. Why the heck should Utility companies have nearly omniscient knowledge about our private lives?

You may be familiar with the debate about Facebook and data mining. The same issues arise here. Will CVPS sell my data and I'll get ads for blenders or worse? Who will own the information after it's collected, me or CVPS? Will the husband paying the electric bill own the data, or will ex-wife be able to subpoena the electro-data-log into divorce court to prove the husband wasn't really watching football that night in question because the TV clearly wasn't on? Will parents of teenagers be able to surveil their daughters, and be able to say, "your lights turned on at 2 a.m. briefly, did you sneak out and see Johnny?" These are creepy scenarios of Too-Much-Information that will be created by this system.

The Wikileaks case showed that no data is eternally free from being hacked. If the US State Department can't keep emails secure, how is CVPS going to keep records secure? They can't. They'll collect five years of data, some hacker will bust open the file, sell it to criminal elements or dump it on the web and then everybody will know you are always out of the house on Sunday mornings for church and that's the time to steal the silverware. Cybersecurity is now in the Post-Wikileaks Era. Deeply secure data is nearly impossible. One of the best strategies is to NOT gather tons of data will be damaging WHEN it gets out. This has to be the State Department's new cybersecurity strategy: no paper trails people! (Telepathy only.)

Another scenario: hackers will crack the code on the EMF signal coming off the meter, sit outside your house for an hour and know that nobody is home and come in. (There's an App for that! It's called Smartmeter Criminal's X-ray Vision). CVPS says, "oh, well, we'll encrypt the signal." Good luck with that, they're trying to create a 'mesh network' of cellphones that talk to each other, and the last thing that system design wants is an encryption code of hundreds of 1's and 0's bouncing back and forth. But even if they did encrypt it, hackers are resolute. It only takes a day after Apple's new smartphone comes out that computer geeks ripe it apart, crack the codes and brag online about it.

Finally, the biggest concern is cancer from Electro-Magnetic Radiation (EMR). Radio-frequency pollution has been identified as a carcinogen since US servicemen in WW2 got cancer while working the radar stations. The European Union is leading the way in regulating cellphones because this technology is also unsafe. The science is a heavy mix of bio-medical information and physics, and it's hard to get across quickly. I encourage people to visit EMFpolicy.org for detailed scientific reports. I'll summarize some of the studies here. Cellphones cause brain cancer, so use sparingly. Pregnant women should not sleep near the Wi-Fi antenna or risk having an autistic child. Leukemia cases rise when living near cellphone towers, as with high-voltage electric lines and the Vatican's high-powered radio station. The brain's extremely complex, low-voltage electro-chemistry doesn't benefit from lots of additional random electricity. Smartmeters will be adding an intense electro-smog system into a world already going mad with unhealthy wireless devices. CVPS says the Smartmeters could be hard-wired with fiber-optic internet cables to eliminate the radio-frequency pollution, but then it would be too expensive to roll out. They'd rather ignore the health issues and pass the health costs onto the public.

The Government regulators are asleep at the switch, brow-beaten into ineffectiveness by corporate propaganda against regulation and so the public is unprotected. Further, the FCC makes money for the gov't selling off slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so it's a conflicted party that shouldn't really be in charge of setting the standards of safety. Smartmeter advocates say "they meet FCC standards" as if that should end the discussion of safety. But the FCC standards were created 30 years ago, based only on measuring thermal (heating) ionizing radiation on a 200 pound adult male. Kids have thinner skulls and cellphones cause their brain tissue to heat up much faster. Further, non-ionizing radiation at lower levels is increasingly linked to biological impacts. The neural-nets of the brain, that vast web of wiring where little charges of biochemical electricity jump from synapse to synapse are designed to work in an absence or vacuum of electricity, and increased ambient electricity from these devices is linked to creating blockages that cause cancer. The government is grossly negligent in protecting us against electro-smog pollution, and it's time for the citizenry to stand up and say, "enough already!"

Some Vermonters are opposing the Smartmeter system. A group called STOPSMETERS.ORG has gotten the issue on the agenda at two Town Meetings in March, when we'll ask our towns to "opt-out." We demand the Utilities wait on installation until the citizens have been able to vote on the issue. We encourage lawmakers to create legislation to insist that the Utilities address our concerns about safety, health and security. Indeed, Vermont Senator Bob Hartwell's bill S214 is doing just that! We encourage our national politicians to re-direct that lovely stimulus money that was earmarked for smartmeters, (that $69 million, thanks Rep. Peter Welch, but, how 'bout we put it towards solar panels?) Our efforts to stop the Wi-Fi-ification of our planet feels like being a little Dutch boy with his finger in a dyke, but we have to start somewhere. Let's start with blocking an Orwellian corporate technology that will surveil us and make us sick in our own homes. Join us in opposing Smartmeters, and more broadly, the invisible 21st century plague of electro-smog.

a film I made in DC this fall