The Occupy Sandy website, http://occupysandy.net, has been revamped to help us all better engage in mutual aid with the survivors of the SuperStorm.

In whatever manner you have taken part, it’s important to recognize and remember that the crisis isn't over. Not by a long shot.

Areas hit by Sandy still need volunteers. Please join us.

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team

Occupy in the News

The Revolution Will Be Augmented: OWS Should Embrace Google Glass

Silicon Angle

Already Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and other protesters have visited the idea of activism and citizen journalism on the front lines of large scale protests by using smartphones and live streaming–but it’s nothing compared to the surveillance capabilities of law enforcement agencies. (ht OWS News Coverage blast: subscribe here).

Free Health Care & Spirited Activism Transform NYC Public Spaces Saturday

Washington Square Public Blog

Occupy Town Square, Strike Debt, and other Occupy Wall Street groups, gathered together Saturday, March 23rd for “Medical Emergency: Life or Debt” with Washington Square Park as the hub.

Cyprus: What Every Occupier Needs to Know

OccupyWallStreet.net

Nicholas Levis from the Alternative Banking Working Group weighs in on the crisis in Cyprus after they rejected a proposed 10 billion European Union bank bailout. Cyprus constitutes “an experiment in total exercise of class power, to see how far a people can be pushed and what might be learned for future cases.”

Mortgage Protesters Occupy Bank in Barcelona

NBC News Photoblog

Members of Mortgage Victims' Platform (PAH), occupy a bank branch during a protest to support neighbors who are facing evictions processes in Barcelona, Spain, on March 19.

Let Me Ascertain You: The Civilians Podcast

By the Civilians

Let Me Ascertain You, from award-winning investigative theater company The Civilians, is a weekly podcast series of performances crafted from interviews with real people about current and controversial topics, including Occupy Wall Street, Atlantic Yards, the adult entertainment industry, Evangelical Christianity, and more. Last week they aired their finale from a 5 part Occupy #S17 series.

Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt Stand in Solidarity With the Community of East Flatbush and the Family of Kimani Gray

OccupyWallSt.org

“Predatory debt, public austerity, emergency restructuring, climate crisis: the disasters of Wall Street hit black and brown people the hardest”. Prior to a solidarity march this Sunday, the following was published - providing details on the rationale of so many occupiers who are supporting the #BrooklynProtest, in a manner that will help provide mutual understanding for solidarity with this neighborhood-led local effort.

Featured Occu-Project of the Week

For over a year now, Occu-Evolve has been holding weekly assemblies and actions focused on "race, class, gender, identity, cultural and structural and direction of the movement.” It was formed out of an ardent commitment to providing outreach to the 99%, particularly people of color, the working class and neighborhood assemblies.

Occu-Evolve’s efforts at this time couldn’t be more timely in light of the tragedy of Kimani Gray and the #BrooklynProtest it has inspired. Check out their Occupy For Kimani (and all victims of police injustice) page for details on “positive, clear, organized and coordinated actions, communication and planning for Justice for Kimani Gray, as well as other victims of unjust and deadly police actions and encounters.”

Continue reading »

Official trailer for "Occupy Love."

Join acclaimed director Velcrow Ripper on a journey deep inside the global revolution of the heart that is erupting around the planet. Humanity is waking up to the fact that the dominant system of power is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning. The resulting crisis has become the catalyst for a profound transformation: millions of people are deciding that enough is enough -- the time has come to create a new world, a world that works for all life.

A feature documentary by Velcrow Ripper. Produced by Ian MacKenzie, Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper.

Executive producers: Betsy Carson, Catherine Tait and Gregg Hill. Music in this trailer by Zoe Keating, Bluetech and Liquid Stranger. A Community Funded Film produced in association with Superchannel and the Canada Media Fund.

"What the film shows, triumphantly, is that love can unite as much as greed can divide." -- Vancouver International Film Festival

The journey began with SCARED SACRED www.scaredsacred.org

The spark ignited with FIERCE LIGHT www.fierceight.org

The time is now to OCCUPY LOVE www.occupylove.com

THE FIERCE LOVE TRILOGY ARRIVES!

GLOBAL LAUNCH BEGINS APRIL 11, 2013! HOST OR FIND A SCREENING IN YOUR TOWN.

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

As the sixth year of the foreclosure crisis comes to an end, the percentage of loans in foreclosure remains a staggering eight times higher than it was in 2005. About 5.3 million homeowners — about 11 percent of all borrowers — are behind on their payments.

But 2012 was also the year that home prices hit a bottom and have started to very slowly climb. The number of new homeowners falling behind on their payments has dropped substantially since the peak. The government also took a dramatic step: a $25 billion settlement with the five biggest mortgage servicers.

Earlier this year, ProPublica focused on one homeowner — Sheila Ramos, who lost her home in Florida and ended up living in a tent in Hawaii — to pull together all the threads of the crisis and give readers a single story that explains the causes of the crisis, the bumbling response by the big banks and Washington, and the human toll exacted by the whole debacle. It is also available as a Kindle Single, which includes extra material.

We've also been keeping a close watch on whether the government is keeping its promises about compensating victims of the crisis.

The largest program is a review overseen by federal regulators covering more than 4 million loans. It launched back in 2011, but as of mid-December, no homeowner had received any compensation. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency spokesman Bryan Hubbard said regulators had been "working toward beginning compensation for a limited number of people [this month] with reviews and remediation continuing through 2013."

The program — called the Independent Foreclosure Review — has been beset with questions about its fairness, transparency and integrity since it launched. At least partly due to those problems, many borrowers aren't even bothering to apply for compensation. As of November, only 315,000 borrowers have sent in forms requesting to be reviewed, according to the OCC's Hubbard, about seven percent of people eligible to apply. The final deadline to apply is at the end of this month.

Federal regulators designed the program to work like this: Each of the banks would hire an "independent consultant" (approved by the regulator) to conduct reviews of the bank's foreclosure cases. The bank was supposed to foot the bill, but the consultant, not the bank, was supposed to decide which of the bank's customers deserved compensation and how much.

But ProPublica has revealed evidence that the banks themselves are heavily involved in the reviews, calling their independence and integrity into question. After our story about Bank of America's involvement in its review, the bank and its consultant changed their review process. Bank of America also engineered a de facto appeals process; if the consultant decided a BofA customer deserved compensation, the bank could provide more information that it wasn't at fault. Borrowers have no such ability to appeal.

To lead its role in the review, JPMorgan Chase installed an executive named by the Justice Department for allegedly facilitating a scheme to defraud Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She declined to comment for our story.

In a telling irony, it seems likely the review will end up steering far more money toward the consulting companies hired by the banks than will go to harmed homeowners.

Finally, some banks have been shockingly slow to begin their reviews. Regulators have ordered Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to conduct reviews of their former mortgage servicing subsidiaries, for instance, but they still haven't begun. The process covers loans that were in foreclosure in 2009 or 2010, but the review won't get going until at least 2013. That seems likely to further deter harmed borrowers from applying for compensation.

A Federal Reserve spokesperson said a company, Navigant Consulting, had been selected to conduct the review for both servicers, but the contracts had not been finalized. It's unclear when the review would begin.

The government's other big reaction to the foreclosure crisis, the National Mortgage Settlement, has also had its disappointments. The deal involved 49 states, the federal government, and the five largest mortgage servicers. The headline number was $25 billion, but only $5 billion of that is actually cash that the big banks would pay out. The other $20 billion is composed of "credits," awarded when the banks take steps to avoid foreclosures, for instance by offering loan modifications that cut the amount homeowners owe.

Of the cash, half — $2.5 billion — was to go to states to address the foreclosure crisis. But as we've reported, almost $1 billion of that is actually being used to patch state's ailing budgets. (See our state-by-state breakdown here.)

$1.5 billion will be sent to borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure, with each borrower receiving only about $1,000-$2,000. That process has finally gotten underway, and the deadline for borrowers to make a claim to receive that payment is early next year. (See more info about this in our FAQ.)

As for the $20 billion in credits, the banks appear to be in the process of fulfilling those obligations, but there are plenty of questions about how much good it's doing. Some credits are for actions banks were taking already (like demolishing abandoned homes). And although government officials touted the agreement as a way to boost the number of modifications that reduced borrowers' debts, much of the banks' activity hasn't focused on keeping borrowers in their homes. Rather, the number of short sales — an agreement by the bank to sell the home for less than the amount owed — has been far higher.

As the foreclosure crisis and the government's sputtering response enter their seventh year, ProPublica will be keeping watch.

Via Occupy Wall Street, Real Democracy Now! Paris:

To the financial institutions of the world, we have only one thing to say: we owe you NOTHING!

To our friends, families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

To the people of the world, we say: join the resistance, you have nothing to lose but your debts.

On O13, in the larger context of the worlwide "globalnoise" mobilisation, and within the Global Week of Action against Debt, we will mobilise against debt in several cities of the world: Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, New York, Rome…

The governments' response to the financial and economic crisis is the same everywhere: cuts in expenditure and austerity measures under the pretext of reducing deficits and the repayment of a public debt which is the direct outcome of decades of neoliberal policies. The same neoliberal policies that have plundered economic and natural resources and exploited human lifes in Latin America, Asia and Africa for decades, are now also being imposed on the people of Europe and North America.

Governments in the service of finance are using this pretext to further reduce social spending, lower wages and pensions, privatize public utility and goods, dismantle social benefits and deregulate labour laws, and increase taxes on the majority, while social and tax giveaways are generalized for the big companies and the highest income households, the rich, the 1%.

Continue reading »

"We, the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts
not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert
the Constitution."

Abraham Lincoln

Foreclosure Fail: Study Pins Blame on Big Banks

by Paul Kiel ProPublica
Over the past several years, we've reported extensively on the big banks' foreclosure failings. As a result of banks' disorganization and understaffing — particularly at the peak of the crisis in 2009 and 2010 — homeowners were often forced to run a gauntlet of confusion, delays, and errors when seeking a mortgage modification.

But while evidence of these problems was pervasive, it was always hard to quantify the damage. Just how many more people could have qualified under the administration's mortgage modification program if the banks had done a better job? In other words, how many people have been pushed toward foreclosure unnecessarily?

A thorough study released last week provides one number, and it's a big one: about 800,000 homeowners.

The study's authors — from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the government's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Ohio State University, Columbia Business School, and the University of Chicago — arrived at this conclusion by analyzing a vast data set available to the OCC. They wanted to measure the impact of HAMP, the government's main foreclosure prevention program.

What they found was that certain banks were far better at modifying loans than others. The reasons for the difference, they established, were pretty predictable: The banks that were better at helping homeowners avoid foreclosure had staff who were both more numerous and better trained.

Continue reading »

In 2008, the United States economy experienced a nearly unprecedented crisis, due to a perfect storm involving banking deregulation, complex derivatives, financial mismanagement, and larger systemic causes, including an inadequate educational system. Three years later, people rose up in protest—an organic national movement called Occupy Wall Street, its members chanting "we are the 99%" and saying that our system was broken, gamed by the wealthy and powerful.

The movement brought an entire nation's frustration with a runaway banking and financial sector, student debt, and unequal educational opportunities to the forefront of public debate. And thoughtful institutions responded, investing time and money to look into the phenomenon. On April 17th and 18th of 2012, the Rockefeller Foundation funded two panel discussions to address these urgent questions. The panels were sponsored by the New School and were held at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Moderator John Cassidy of The New Yorker perhaps summed up the issues best when he noted that the 1960s and 1970s had discredited the idea of an all-efficient government, and the 90s and zeros had done a very good job of discrediting the idea of an all-efficient market. "What's to replace both of those ideologies?" Cassidy asked. "That remains to be seen--Occupy Wall Street is obviously a part of the discussion."

Panelists included, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow; Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston; world-class international economists Jeffrey Sachs, Raghu Rajan, Carmen Reinhart, and Robin Wells; the Financial Times's Martin Wolf, and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair.

Both panels grew out of The Occupy Handbook, a compendium of articles, edited by Janet Byrne, featuring leading economists and others on the causes and implications of the Occupy movement. This video features selections from the two panel discussions as well as public remarks by contributors to the Handbook.

Sharpie parties:

In the age of Facebook and Twitter, a new crime has hit America: "Sharpie parties," gatherings of revelers armed with "Sharpie" magic markers and lured by social media invitations to wreak havoc on foreclosed homes.

Five years into the U.S. foreclosure crisis, Sharpie parties are a new form of blight on the landscape of boarded-up homes, brown lawns and abandoned streets. They are also the latest iteration of collective home-trashing spurred by social media.

At least six Sharpie parties were reported in one California county in recent months, where invitations posted online drew scores to foreclosed homes.

The partygoers are handed Sharpie pens on arrival by their hosts and urged to graffiti the walls - a destructive binge that often prompts other acts of vandalism, including smashing holes in walls and doors, flooding bathrooms and ripping up floors.

If revenge on the banks is the motive, does anyone think the banks really care? They make their money no matter what, that's how they stay rich and powerful, they designed the system to work that way.

Those of us fighting to change the system, and hoping to see crooked bankers punished for things like mortgage fraud will have a more difficult time doing that if we're all looked upon as criminals or potential criminals. Please, think beyond yourself, and remember that there are families still fighting to keep their homes.

Oh, and what happened to the geniuses who destroyed the home in the video? Facebook (They used the site to send out invites, and then posted photos of party.) turned over everything in the accounts of the party "hosts" and they're all facing multiple felony charges.

The 'Economic Suicides':

“I have no solution in front of me." -- Antonis Perris of Greece, unemployed for two years before he took the hand of his 90-year-old mother and climbed to the roof of their apartment building and leapt to their death.

In his last note on an online music discussion site, Perris wrote that his mother had Alzheimer’s disease and that he had recently learned he was ill. He had not expected a recession, so he had not saved money. His credit cards were maxed out. He had started selling his family’s possessions but saw no permanent solution to his problems. He blamed the “powerful of this Earth” for his situation.

Giuseppe Campaniello of Italy set himself on fire outside a government tax office in Bologna on March 28 after his company collapsed.

“I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.” — Retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, 77, who shot himself in Athens’s central square on April 4.

“Violence is to work 40 years for peanuts and to wonder if you’ll ever get to retire. . . . Violence is unemployment.” — Savvas Metoikidis, 44, who hanged himself in his father’s warehouse in Thessaloniki on April 21.

“I hope my grandchildren will never be born in Greece.” — A 61-year-old electrician who hanged himself from a tree in Athens on May 30.

To date there have been 7,387 Occupy protesters arrested in the United States alone. Bankers? Zero.

More articles on economic suicide:

Death by Foreclosure

Wells Fargo Drives Homeowner to Suicide

'Dying for Work' Billboard's Dangling Dummy Disturbs Drivers

CRISIS from urban research collective on Vimeo.

In the time of multiple crisis, millions of Americans are struck by unemployment, poverty and homelessness. This documentary explores different dimensions of the crisis and articulates the fight for social justice and for the Right to the City. It travels from New York to Fresno and interrelates theoretical analysis with the everyday struggle on the streets.