The past week has brought a flurry of excitement, as the Free Cooper Union effort has led to over 50 students, faculty, and staff maintaining a sit-in occupation inside college President Jamshed Bharucha’s office on the 7th floor of the Foundation Building of the Cooper Union.

This occupation comes in response to the decision to begin charging tuition for the first time, ending a 154 year tradition of free education, as well as in the context of the broader unfolding tuition and student debt crisis across the country.

Watch Free Cooper Union on livestream and follow their live-tweets @FreeCooperUnion.

Many Occupy groups have protested outside in solidarity, The Illuminator has projected on the walls, Occupy Museums delivered sushi for dinner.

We stand in solidarity with the students, faculty, and next generation of art students who have lost this amazing gift from Peter Cooper, education which is “free as air and water.”

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team

United Against Pipelines Update

This Monday, hundreds of occupiers and climate activists from dozens of groups came together to challenge President Obama on the Keystone XL Pipeline and climate change at large during a fundraiser he was holding with the 1%.

Check out photos of the action on Flickr, watch livestream footage from StopMotionSolo, and join the protest this Thursday of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his promotion of the pipeline.

Occupy in the News

Allison Kilkenny at The Nation covers developments with Free Cooper Union, and Felix Salmon at Reuters chronicles the tragedy of Cooper Union.

PressTV covered Obama being greeted in NY by Occupy protesters.

The Village Voice blog covers DebtFair, an action initiated by Occupy Museums to draw attention to debt and inequality within the art world. “Turn[ing] art fairs and auctions like Frieze New York and Sotheby’s on their heads” the fairs will display art about debt at many populist venues as well as “in front of banks or ‘more arrestable actions’ inside banks...”

At hyperallergic.com, Debtfair’s mission was described as such: “...to predicate compensation [for an artist] on their debt load, allowing patrons to make direct payments on their student loans or outstanding consumer credit. By correlating the value of an artwork with the fiscal situation of its producer, it’s an objection to capitalist exchange...”

The Arts and Labor Working Group, along with various affected unions, has been agitating for changes in the hiring practices of the Frieze New York art fair. Letters were sent out recently asking participants to boycott over Frieze’s unfair use of non-union labor.

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The Illuminator returned to Wall Street earlier this week, and just in time for tax season. To celebrate the occasion, occupiers went and projected a Wii-mote controlled videogame where the player fights greedy corporate tax evaders on the wall of one such greedy corporate tax evader, Citibank.

A good time was had by all, and there are many more actions planned for the days ahead. Stay tuned!

(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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The Illuminator - Occupy's Bat Signal - comes to Trump Tower to project the truth about Donald Trump's efforts to bulldoze the 99% and a Scottish environmental legacy to build a golf course for elite jet-setters.

Justin Wedes, from the OWS Media Team, narrates.