No surprises here, but in a new study the Bloomberg administration has found that half the residents of New York City are "poor" or "near-poor," meaning that they were "making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold." A small increase in the number of poor-- 3 percent since 2009 -- yet again, a telling marker in the city with the billionaire mayor and over 50,000 homeless men, women and children sleeping in shelters each night.

The city’s analysis warned that cutbacks in federal programs could threaten any recovery and place pressure on the next mayor to maintain or expand public assistance.

“The recent increase in the state minimum wage affects the working poor and near-poor, and paid sick days are important, but missing rungs in the ladder make it really hard to climb out of poverty,” said Nancy Rankin, vice president for policy research and advocacy at the Community Service Society, which lobbies on behalf of the poor.

New York City's billionaire mayor, btw, opposed both the minimum wage increase and paid sick days.

America’s most iconic city now has the same inequality index as Swaziland, note the editors at The Nation.

(F-bomb warning.)

Recently, (2/8/13) I was arrested in Brooklyn while driving a van outfitted with a projector. Long story short, it was pretty horrible; friends and fellow activists have encouraged me to set down precisely what happened and put it in the public record.

If you don’t know, there is a van with a heavy duty projector that comes out of the roof like a turret. It was created by an OWS offshoot with funding from Ben Cohen, and was named The Illuminator. Some months ago, ownership and control was passed on to a campaign called the Stamp Stampede, created by Ben Cohen, and was referred to as the Project-O-Van.

A month ago, Animal New York, a website that covers culture and politics, arranged to carry out a joint action with the Stampede campaign, using our van.. Together, we visited a number of locations throughout the city to project images highlighting the problem of money in politics corrupting our democracy. We visited the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, Trump Tower, some walls in Soho and the LES, and…. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s home on 79th Street.

It was exciting to get a picture of a ballot box being stuffed with money projected onto Bloomberg’s 3rd floor. As the residence is protected by police, our team was approached by cops who chatted with Animal New York folks and filmed our van. I stuck around for about one minute – just long enough to take a few photos.

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In the aftermath of the hurricane, volunteers mobilized to provide aid to Rockaway residents. Twelve hundred and fifty one surveys were collected from residents living in Far Rockaways.

In the last two weeks of December, NYCC organizers called and visited a sample of the initial survey takers to assess the current habitability situation, two months after Hurricane Sandy hit.

The results document a clear failure by the Bloomberg administration to solve several problems of habitability, including electricity, heat, wet sheetrock removal and mold remediation.

A significant number of Rockaway residents have still not returned to their homes. And for those that have been lucky enough to return home, things are still not back to normal.

Sandy Survivors Day of Action and Citywide Convergence #D15 - Rebuild the City: Restore Power to the People!

FEMA ISN’T LISTENING. THE MAYOR ISN’T LISTENING. WHERE ARE THEY? PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE SHOULD SERVE THE PEOPLE.

#ReclaimNYC – #D15 – Facebook Event
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15th – POST-SANDY CALL TO ACTION
12pm actions in affected communities
5pm convergence in Manhattan @ Bloomberg’s house

Two months after Superstorm Sandy the disaster is not over and relief needs are still great. Homes are uninhabitable with black mold taking hold, heat and sanitation are still absent in many places. Yet the government response has been glaringly absent. As with Katrina and other recent disaster-and-recovery events city, state and federal agencies have handed off reconstruction resources and responsibility to corporations and markets.

That hand-off has pushed affected people further out of their communities, further into crisis and vulnerability, and further from the decision-making tables that allocate public resources. Where government has failed, Occupy and other groups stepped in.

But we now understand that climate change has turned a corner: we will be hard hit again by extreme weather events. And so we ask whose interests our government serves? Is it polluters, predatory lenders, and disaster profiteers? Or can we build a stronger, better, resilient New York where all of us, regardless of race, class or power, can weather future storms?

12PM COMMUNITY RALLIES

Staten Island
1128 Olympia Boulevard
Across from St. Margaret Mary’s Church

Rockaways
Parking Lot on Mott Av. And 21st Street

5PM CITYWIDE RALLY

Mayor Bloomberg’s home
17 East 79th
btw 5th Ave & Madison Ave
Manhattan

[Via OWS]

[Via @samsteinhp]

New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to endorse President Obama for re-election on Thursday, after realizing that Republicans just don’t care about climate change.

It seems that the folks at Fox News didn’t take this news well at all. The Fox News homepage links to a story called “Bloomberg Backs Romney,” which then does describe Bloomberg’s Obama endorsement. But a headline on the homepage? Even I wouldn't want to see Tucker Carlson hyperventilate. There are enough gases in the air as it is.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a reporter on Monday that forcing the NYPD to submit to oversight from an inspector general would destroy the city of New York:

Appointing an inspector general to oversee the NYPD is a recipe for disaster, Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday.

“I think if you want to bring crime back, let’s go politicize control of the Police Department,” the mayor said, responding to a reporter’s question about a new City Council bill requiring an IG for cops getting a hearing tomorrow.

“The last thing we need is some politician or judge getting involved with setting policy, because you won’t be safe anymore. But today, you are. Think about that when you write your story,” Bloomberg added.

Who the hell is safe in NYC? It sure wasn't this teenager who was forced to submit to the NYPD's version of 'Stop and Frisk':

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The first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was a joyous affair for the 99%.

Yet regrettably, it was also a day that illustrated how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ‘private army’ has been increasingly unleashed to beat, arrest, imprison, and broadly suppress OWS.

Please post your videos, photos, and stories about how your rights were infringed on the Occupy Bloomberg’s Army Facebook page.

Occupy is a nonviolent movement, but this has not prevented Bloomberg’s Army from engaging in targeted arrests of specific organizers as well as random street ‘snatch and release’ intimidation tactics.

On September 17th not even the constant drone of helicopters overhead could drown out the screams of ‘I’m a journalist’ from the reporters who were arrested merely for practicing their and our right to freedom of the press.

And not even a cry of ‘I’m a City Councilmember’ was enough to staunch the established policy of brutality within the Mayor of Wall Street’s Police Department.

The message being sent by Bloomberg’s Army is being heard loud and clear. In Bloomberg’s New York: anyone who supports Occupy Wall Street in any fashion is being made an example of.

Were you one of these people extra-legally arrested or assaulted, or have you witnessed someone who was?

Post your videos, photos, and stories on the Occupy Bloomberg’s Army Facebook page.

We will not be stymied by the over 180 arrests on our anniversary, nor intimidated by the unprovoked and random nature of so many of them.

We will fight for our right to protest Wall Street while we protest Wall Street itself.

All Roads Lead To Wall Street

[Via]

Help Protect Occupy From Mayor Bloomberg's 'Private Army' For Our Anniversary: http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50112/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8353

Do You Have Occupy's Back? If So, Tell the Mayor of Wall Street, & Join Us For #S17.

Produced by members of the 'Your Inbox Occupied' team and Occupy Public Access TV. Special thanks to 'Spirit Animal' for letting us use their song 'I'm Around' and for helping at large.

Thousands of people from civil rights groups walked down New York City's Fifth Avenue in total silence Sunday, marching in protest of "stop-and-frisk" tactics employed by city police.

The quiet was interrupted only by the tapping of feet on the pavement and birds chirping as protesters strode along Central Park from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's town house on the Upper East Side townhouse.

For almost 30 city blocks, the march moved slowly and silently. Then, as they passed Bloomberg's home on East 79th Street, the crowd erupted in protest chants. The house was blocked by police barricades.

It was not known if Bloomberg was at home when the protesters passed.

Critics say the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics. Last year, the NYPD stopped more than 600,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago.

Via:

Tensions increased between police officers and a group of protesters who tried to keep walking down Fifth Avenue below East 77th Street.

Police officers on scooters lined both sides of the avenue and officers on foot formed a line to keep people on the sidewalk. Several scuffles broke out between screaming protesters and officers who pushed them behind barricades on the sidewalk.
...
"The silence ended and the people's voices came out," said Matthew Swaye, 34, a former Bronx school teacher and self-described longtime Occupy protester.

"We were told to go home and we weren't ready to go yet," said Swaye, who added that his wife, Christina Gonzalez, 25, was one of the protesters arrested in the melee.

The practice of silent marches dates to 1917, when the NAACP led a protest through New York against lynchings and segregation in the U.S.

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DemocracyNow!:

The Coalition for the Homeless reports the number of people living in New York City homeless shelters has reached an all-time high of 43,000. Critics attribute the spike in homelessness to the Bloomberg administration’s alleged failure to help move homeless families into permanent affordable housing. Housing advocates say the problem was exacerbated by the city’s cancellation of the "Advantage" apartment rental subsidy, with as many as 8,000 former aid recipients now facing eviction. We get a report from Democracy Now!’s Chantal Berman, who interviewed several aid recipients who could soon lose their homes, and speak to Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless in New York City

Full transcript below the fold...

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