Some of the largest demonstrations in the history of Madrid, Santiago (Chile), Montreal, Frankfurt, and Moscow rose up in the streets in common call this past week. The people on the ground referenced each other’s particular resistance movements, from the Spanish call to Indígnate to the New York-cum-global call to Occupy. People continued to march or rebel, depending on their capacity for struggle, in New York, the Bay Area, Bahrain, Gaza, and Syria.

By week’s end, our eyes have shifted to Chicago, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an anachronistic western coalition of former colonial empires that was formed officially to counter Soviet influence, assembled to discuss the 11-year occupation of Afghanistan and the coercive administration of neo-colonialism the world over.

Are there divisions in the halls of power? Many. Some have hopes that the moderate “Socialist” president of France, Francois Hollande, may take stiffer stances against austerity and European intervention in other continents. Many have similar expectations of Syriza, the Greek party that was partly born out of the counter-globalization movement, which is now in the lead for the second round of elections. When people rise in the streets, it sharpens the contradictions in the strategies of rule by the world’s rich until, sometimes. And just sometimes, they are pushed from below to abandon the most egregious of structures.

Quebec is witnessing what some say are its largest marches in history, where a student strike (GGi) will wake to it’s 100^th dawn this coming Tuesday. Late Friday night, the provincial government passed the emergency Loi 78 (or as one angry assemblyman called it, Loi Fuck) to suppress the student resistance, prompting some legislators to walk out and call for mass civil disobedience. Twenty-five thousand students hit the streets the next day to challenge authorities. Similar movements against austerity have been hitting Chile for years, and this week has seen them flow back into the streets, banging a cacerolazo in a resounding opposition to President Piñera. In Moscow, fraudulent elections pulled tens of thousands into the streets, and though police violence depleted their numbers, still they rise. In Frankfurt, the financial capital of Germany, they too saw twenty-five thousand join Blockupy to prove that austerity is just as unpopular in the power base of the European Union as it is in the smaller economies that it tries to beat into submission.

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment was defeated because people rose up. As was the Free Trade Area of the America, which could have turned all of the Americas into a free trade zone, rather than forcing the United States to negotiate bilaterals, often in the public eye, and passing them at a snail’s pace. The World Trade Organization spent years languishing during its search for cities to host its meetings, and a gathering of poor and underdeveloped countries walked out of some of the meetings, suggesting that they were no longer interested in neo-colonial relationships. These were victories for the people in the streets. And those streets were never just the streets outside of the summits themselves: they were the streets of the downtrodden of the world. Marching together in lockstep against a tyranny of western markets.

NATO should see a similar such death. It was created as an anti-communist counterweight to the fake communists of the Soviet Union (indeed, Stalin killed more communists than anyone save Hitler), and stayed on to perform it’s real mission: remain the preeminent military alliance of former empires of Europe, the longstanding imperialism of the United States, and neocolonial administrations in the so-called Global South. It functions to oust genuinely brutal regimes that are out of favor with the west, and replace them with genuinely brutal regimes that will capitulate to western economic demands.

Chicago organizers planned some beautiful acts of resistance. They marched on the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a conservative and hawkish Democrat who once served in the occupying Israeli Defense Forces. They marched on some of the six mental health clinics that are being shuttered by Mayor Emanuel, half of the city’s twelve, which are needed by veterans, LGBTQ youth and anyone else with psychological side effects from a life of alienation caused by systemic oppression. In coalition with Occupy Chicago, many Chicagoans recently occupied some of these clinics in their defense. They marched with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, who are hurling their medals in disdain for the murder and exploitation that they were sent by the rich to fight for. They marched for the environment, an Earth that the rich abuse as a spoiled child does with his toys, always with the expectation that another toy planet can be purchased. They were joined by thousands of counter-globalization, anti-war, and Occupy activists, dissident voices in an age that for too long was considered to be saddled with complacency.

The people who are rising up in Chicago, some active only since September and others for many decades, have built infrastructure. They have an office for NATO INDYMEDIA (something that was spawned from the counter-globalization movement and is a more politically cohesive but broad-based version of Occupy media working groups). They have a convergence center in a near north side church. They have teams of street medics, complemented by others from across the country, an amazing legal team, and a strong sense of linking the global with the local.

They were met with the police state. City, state, and federal law enforcement did what they’ve been doing to brown people every day, and what they did to Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-war, counter-globalization, Occupy, union, Puerto Rican independence, anti-police brutality, immigrants rights, American Indian, environmentalist, international solidarity, anarchist, communist, anti-austerity, and every other dissident voice on the left for decades. There was brutal repression.

The Police State, ain't no new thing.

The raid of a home late Wednesday night ended in the detention of eight people planning to protest the NATO summit, three of whom had videotaped a police stop just days earlier during which officers were recorded joking about violence against demonstrators. Three of the eight were held past a Saturday noon bond hearing, where they were to be held at $1.3 million bail collectively. Some say that the activists were simply planning to make home brewed beer, a common hobby in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times noted that three agent provocateurs had approached the men about using Molotov cocktails, a minor incendiary device common in protests in other countries. If so, the case stinks of the kind of entrapment we've seen from the Newburgh 4 to the very recent Ohio 5. Two more have since been arrested in the case.

At least three New Yorkers are confirmed to have been among the unknown number who were hospitalized on May 19th, one’s nose was broken, a second required five stitches, and a third who was hit by a police van in a taped incident, but has since made a partial recovery. Most were attacked in marches held in solidarity with the three held on excessive bail mentioned above, or, later, in an anti-capitalist march through downtown Chicago that intermittently broke police lines. Independent livestreamers were visited by police, guns drawn, in one of many clear cases of intimidation of the evolving autonomous civilian press. And in a smack in the face to the memory of Malcolm X (in addition to his birthday, 5/19 was indeed the birthday of Ho Chi Minh and nearly of Augusto Sandino), they based some of their officers at Malcolm X College.

The police refer to our fight for liberation on their radios as the “conflict zone.” It smacks of the use of "class war" as a right-wing epithet against anyone working for the emancipation of the poor and working classes. But let us be clear: We didn't create the conflict. The rich did. When they conquered Africa, Asia and the Americas, and refused to give up their grip as people revolted for political independence. They did when they profited off of the more than twenty million who die each year of hunger and malnutrition. They did as they sold the derivatives of the debt of millions of students, of millions of uninsured patients, of eight million North American homeowners in foreclosure, on the displacement of hundreds of millions of peasants and indigenous people across the poorest parts of our planet, including Black and Latin@ communities gentrified out of their hoods, barrios, communities, and public housing projects. They survive off of the conflict that they created, indeed thrive. If they will not relinquish the reigns of power, we will indeed bring conflict. And just as the tentacles of a capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy (in the words of bell hooks) are global and all-encompassing, reaching into every tuft of earth and internalized into every wrinkle of our minds and hearts, we are everywhere. Fighting back. Inside our bodies, inside our hearts and minds, and on the streets, outside the halls of power, in the plazas, the parks, the abandoned buildings, the closing worksites, the unused lands of the haciendas.

If people were worried about the demise of Occupy Wall Street before this past week, when people rose up in Germany, Chile, Russia, Bahrain, the United States, Spain, they had their heads in the wrong place. Whatever we call ourselves, with or without some idealized language like occupy or progressive or anarchist, we are everywhere. And like the soft-lock lines in Chicago, we will, sometimes, be bludgeoned back by the forces of violence here to protect their exploitative system. But, sometimes, we will break their lines, and march forward, for tomorrow is ours to create.

Palante, siempre palante.

Members of the New York Police Department and private security contractors guard Zuccotti Park following the early morning surprise eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters on November 15th, 2011. Photo by David Shankbone.

According to Manhattan civil rights attorney and radio host Yetta Kurland, at 9:45 AM today City Councilmembers Melissa Mark-Veverito, Ydanis Rodriguez, and members of the Occupy Wall Street citizen press will hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall announcing a Federal lawsuit being filed on behalf of members of OWS. Some of the details are embargoed until the event, but as soon as we get the go-ahead, we’ll post the full details.

There will also be an 11AM press conference held by OWS at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park).

During both events, we’ll run a CoverItLive session to include livetweets  and will update this page as a liveblog.

"ACT UP/NY! and Occupy: Tax Wall Street and End AIDS" protest sticker by Chip Duckett, courtesy ACT UP/NY

This morning, ACT-UP/NY and Occupy Wall Street will demonstrate beginning at 11AM at City Hall to mark the 25th Anniversary of ACT-UP, or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

ACT-UP began in 1987 as an anarchist network that coalesced to fight against homophobia and for justice. According to Wikipedia, ACT-UP’s first action took place in March 1987 on Wall Street — and 17 were arrested that day for acts of civil disobedience. It seems likely that we’ll see arrests today, as well, as this press release seems to confirm:

WHAT: ACT-UP 25th ANNIVERSARY DEMONSTRATION ON WALL STREET
WHEN: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25 – 10:30 AM

WHERE: 10:30 AM – East Side of City Hall - Pre-Rally Interviews with Speakers - this is an interview opportunity for media ONLY
11:00 AM – West Side of City Hall – Speakers at Rally Kick off the Demonstration - please notify the public of this!

WHAT WILL HAPPEN:
Hundreds of AIDS activists will gather outside City Hall to hear brief speeches on current topics of concern on HIV/AIDS issues, with specific demands, including the need for a Financial Speculative Tax to be funneled to health care.  The demonstration will leave City Hall and go down Broadway, with a couple of other stops at key locations, ending at Trinity Church with a personal commemoration of loved ones lost to AIDS. ACT-UP chapters and supporters are busing into New York from Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Washington and other cities to participate with the New York groups.  A number of supportive national and local organizations and individuals will join ACT-UP in the demonstration, including Housing Works, National Nurses United, and Occupy Wall Street, among many others.

Acts of civil disobedience may occur during the demonstration, which is expected to last about two to two and a half hours.

Check the right-hand column for live video and, in the CoverItLive session, live tweets from the Daily Occ team and other street journalists at today’s action. And, below, we’ll update this page live with highlights and news! No need to refresh the page; updates will appear automagically as they’re posted.

Live Updates:

Of course, how would you know that the government is keeping tabs on you? It’s easy enough to be paranoid, to sit wide-eyed, staring at all of your devices like each one was a tentacle of Big Brother to peer into our lives. If the FBI is our secretive political police, our STASI, our domestic state terrorists – then we mustn’t let the terrorists win (y’know, to paraphrase a popular former president.) If the FBI appears to be or actually is breathing down our necks, it’s important we don’t allow that to compromise our friendships, our camaraderies, our political work, and our ability to feel comfortable in our own skins. Forever vigilant, never paranoid.

I figure the FBI naturally picked the perfect guy to pick on. I’ve been visited before. My friends have been intimidated before. I’ve spent years training people on how to deal with federal agents’ and local cops’ dirty tricks. And three days after the following incident, I was co-organizing a major forum about political repression by federal authorities of people organizing for social change.

I received a phone call while I was waiting for the train. The caller never explicitly said who they were, except that they wanted to talk to me so could I visit Public Safety at a CUNY school. It seemed implied that it was Public Safety, the chosen title of the campus security force. I arrived, went passed the turnstiles, and entered the office, Palestinian keffiyeh around my neck. The receptionist pointed me in, and I entered a room with three individuals too well-dressed to be Public Security.

They closed the door. Lisa, Greg, and John. From the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I exaggerated a response and began laughing in their faces. I had been caught surprised.

Lisa was the main talker. She sat with an arrest file of mine on her grey pantsuited lap, leafing between blown-up mugshots of me and reports of charges that had stuck or been dropped.

FBI agents, even more than cops in general, have been trained in psychology. Their point is to get you talking. The moment you start, you have either said something you can’t take back, or don’t know when to quit. I can’t know what they wanted me to talk about. If you don’t answer the questions, you don’t find out what the real subject is. Usually, what they first begin talking to you about is not at all accurate. It might be just a corollary to another subject altogether. If they asked me if the sky was blue, if the Mets were winning, or what color eyes I have, I’d tell them the magic words:

“May I see your badge? Can you give me a business card? I am going to remain silent. You can speak to my lawyer.”

Lisa asked if she could ask me some questions. It was specifically about any Antifa work they believed I had been involved in. They claimed that they wanted me to give them leads on some hate crimes. They know I don’t like hate crimes based on information gleaned from my arrest records. Hey, they’re on my side. This is where I call bullshit.

I refused to answer their questions, but had a merry ole time doing so. When they asked if I would answer questions, I replied “Absolutely… not.” They got excited, then did a double take. I cackled.

“But you can tell me the questions you were going to ask.” They got two and a half questions in before they saw that I wasn’t about to respond.

“Listen, we’re just trying find out about hate crimes against African-Americans, Latinos and Jews.”

“Yeah, what about Muslims?” They fell silent. Then Lisa fucked up, and said something else that proved to be a lie. I called her out on it, and they fell silent again.

Lisa and her colleagues refused my entreaties for a business card, which dragged the interview to about four minutes from what it should’ve been: thirty seconds. I walked out the door with the FBI’s main New York office number that Lisa wrote down for me, which she lied was her “direct line” and had my National Lawyers’ Guild attorney fax them a letter declaring that I wouldn’t be speaking.

I acted fast. After calling my Guild lawyer, I contacted friends who were nearby to find me. I contacted friends who may have been questioned or be the next subjects to be questioned. A friend helped forward my story to as many appropriate websites as possible so that if anyone else was visited over the next 24 hours, they might be more prepared than I was. I told students in the hallways to get people ready if they saw the agents in the halls, and the students were receptive. And finally, I returned to the very same office with two reporters 20 minutes after the incident, unfortunately after the agents had fled.

I’ll cut the story short there, although I am currently happy to spread the word if it teaches others in immediate danger of FBI visits what they should be doing in such an event:

Don’t let them play any games.
Don’t answer questions beyond basic identification.
Don’t acknowledge knowing someone, working somewhere, or anything else.
Don’t deny or affirm.
If they have a warrant or subpoena, immediately call the National Lawyers Guild.
Ask for a badge and a business card.
Tell them you will remain silent.
Then do so.

And then get back to your political work and your comrades who love you. We are all in this together. And we’re much safer if we remember that every day.

Part three in a three-part installment detailing the events of #m24 which carried over through the morning of #m26. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

2pm: The next day, Sunday, m25, when I got to 100 Centre Street, there were half a dozen Occupiers holding camp outside. They had a supply of food, water and cigarettes ready for anyone who might be released. There were several others inside the courtrooms as well; they were tracking docket numbers and arraignments, and liaising between the National Lawyers Guild, those of us on the outside, and off-site Jail Support coordinators.

The off-site coordinators handle a phone and text line that people can contact to insure the NLG has been notified of an arrest and to get information about a comrade after arrest. By reaching out to the jail support team via text and email, and the larger OWS community via Twitter, the team helps to make sure that people—jail support—are at the precinct or courthouse whenever someone is being detained. They also provide “Know Your Rights” and Jail Support training.  This educates people on the roles and tasks that are essential to keeping track of our comrades as they move through the system. Additionally the training outlines the information required by the NLG during the arraignment process, as well as preparing for potential future court dates.

Although we are there specifically to provide support to Occupy Wall Street protestors, we will offer support to anyone getting out of jail, if it is within our means to do so. If we have food available, and they’re hungry, we feed them. If we have water or juice or coffee, and they want some, we give it to them. When people ask to bum or buy a cigarette—the most common post-release request—we oblige, free of charge.

This is arguably one of the most important and effective outreach efforts that OWS partakes in. The opportunity to talk with working class people, mostly black and Latin@, who are especially targeted by the NYPD, allows us to reach members of targeted communities on an incredibly personal level and make a connection between their situations and a larger political struggle. We’re all at the arbitrary control of the system, dehumanized for profit, and made to to struggle so others may gain.

Hopefully they share what they saw and talked to us about with their friends, families, and communities.

When we got to the 7^th Precinct we immediately noticed the blue NYPD barriers erected in front of the building. They blocked the stairs and most of the sidewalk, restricting access only via the handicap ramp. Our comrade Jamie, of the People’s Library, was already on location, having rushed to the station after word of the first arrest.

We were told that 12 people were being held inside the precinct—Amelia, Negesti, Mesiah, and 9 more Occupiers.

Jamie beat the first police van to the precinct and saw all of our comrades enter the station. She reported that Mesiah looked shaken and sad. Amelia and Negesti were upset but not hurt. The van had been hot, their handcuffs too tight, the cops less than cordial.

Shortly after we got there we saw Mesiah escorted out of the precinct, her arm wrapped up in a makeshift sling, and into an ambulance. Presumably, she was headed to Bellevue Hospital on 1^st Avenue at 27^h Street, where people who are injured and in custody go, including those injured by the police during their arrests.

We showed our support from across the street. We jumped up and down, yelled out her name, and fashioned our hands into a heart shape—a “point of affection” in OWS sign language. Mesiah was all smiles, which was surprising considering her afternoon ordeal. I was overwhelmed with joy when she smiled back at us.

Over the next hour several more friends and comrades, including Eli, a medic, and Oscar, one of the Occu-puppies, joined us. Eli was on hand to do support for her partner, Daniel, who had been arrested for the third time in about a week. According to Eli, Daniel had been in the march for about 15 minutes before he was harassed and targeted by the police for arrest.

Our emotions were high and intensifying—the police were offering us very limited information on the status of our comrades. It was reassuring to have Oscar on hand. Sitting with him in my lap helped to settle some of my anger.

Alexander Berkman, Anarchist Leader (and Lover of Emma Goldman) Speaks to IWW Rally, Union Square, New York City, 1914. Uncredited Photograph.

Folks’ efforts have shifted from the process-centric General Assembly and Spokescouncil to a series of community dialogues, heal-ins, and spontaneous, ad-hoc project-based groups. There’s been an emergent consensus from many of these events that a less-structured, dialogue-centric weekly meeting might serve the community better at this point than the General Assembly.

Earlier today, the OWS Facilitation Working Group released a statement today explaining that due to “an emerging consensus that the General Assembly as it currently exists no longer meets the community’s needs,” it would cease to send a facilitation team to General Assembly.

But I’ve little doubt that you’ll find many members of the Facilitation Working Group at tonight’s Great Meeting. Daily Occupier contributor @sabokitty explained the Great Meeting thus:

When we Occupy Wall Street, we build new, temporary structures to fulfill our needs. We construct them as needed, and let them whither away as their purposes end. We don’t seek to create new corruptible or abusive institutions that become ritualistic or static, that exist simply for the sake of existing. When there are new needs, there must be new experiments to create space for direct democracy. Where experiments become stale, we prepare to experiment once again. From General Assemblies to Spokes Councils to Open Spaces to Community Meetings to Working Groups to drum circles to, we think, a Great Meeting at Union Square.

In this spirit, a number of longtime occupiers and indignados are coming together to call for a mass assembly to be held this coming Wednesday, April 4th, at Union Square Park at abot 6:30pm. That date has special significance as the anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., one among millions who fought hard against economic inequality and white racism, and we apologize in advance if this conflicts with the plans of others on this date (New York City is big, there are always conflicts). Union Square Park has long been a base of social upheaval, soapboxing, mass dissent, and public discussion, from the Great Meeting that rallied New Yorkers to the Union cause in April of 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War, to the types of labor rallies that Emma Goldman and others spoke at. We would like our Great Meeting to be on the North end of Union Square, because we have no desire to displace the skaters, breakdancers, trick bikers, punks, and other subcultures that called the south end home for decades. In the past two weeks, we have seen these youth co-mingle and fade into the ranks of more clearly defined occupiers, and we have seen police repress them in an effort to divide the youth who would have been in Union Square any Spring from people coming to be a part of Occupy Wall Street. We have no desire to be party to such a displacement, even as we have every intention of keeping a presence on the south end of the park.

And so, after weeks of arrests and wounds, amazing actions and incredible solidarity, we want to come back together to discuss political questions surrounding anything ranging from economic equality to food and health care justice to upcoming actions to the Spanish general strike, to dream together of the new world that think is possible enough that we’ve stuck it out for all of these months, and perhaps to discuss practical concerns about our shift toward Union Square as a reclamation of the commons, . We are not necessarily coming together to make concrete decisions. We don’t want to rebuild an abusive institution where we bring proprietary proposals or disrupt each others’ processes, or dole out funds based on the most boisterous voice or best white collar hustle. We want to create something healthy, something exciting, something temporary and dynamic and capable of constant adaptation, something for all of our many voices and for all of our many dreams.

We have no intention of creating a permanent structure to be led by a static dogma, nor are we yet suggesting it be scheduled weekly, daily, bi-weekly, or simply as we find the need. We simply want a new experiment which will bring as many occupiers, indignados, citizens, undocumented, youth, breakers, skaters, workers, unemployed, displaced, poor, wealthy, uncomfortable, healthy, disabled, indignant members of the 99% together to allow us all to have voice for our dreams. Give us all space for our old projects to grow and new ones to spring up on nothing more than the fertile ground of your own will and desires.

The day is supposed to be pretty, the date has incredible significance, Union Square is a great venue that has been a space for popular culture and conversation for 150 years, and this simply feels right. We hope to see you there, and hear your voice rise alongside ours in the people’s mic.

Chepe later explains: “This call sprang from conversations had by people from facilitation, direct action, livestream, and several other working groups, as well as those who exist outside of working group structures.” The Facebook Event is here.

https://www.facebook.com/events/391547300864939/

Below, please find our live transcript of the event, part of our experimentation with different ways of providing live updates since the transition away from General Assembly and the @LibertySqGA accounts.

March 17 was the 6-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street moving into Zuccotti Park, renaming it Liberty Square and the beginning of the Occupy Movement worldwide.

We celebrated all day, in style—chanting, dancing, marching, holding a General Assembly that needed three waves of the People’s Microphone—until the police brutally crashed our party—beating and violently arresting over 73 Occupiers in the park and on the march that ensued. It was probably the most violent day in our short history, and we have not been able to determine that any of the incidents were warranted or incited by an Occupier.

Our response was two-fold. On Tuesday, March 20, we held a press conference at 1 Police Plaza with allied communities—Muslim, Latin@, LGBT, Black, undocumented, and the undomiciled—to call for an end to police repression, brutality, surveillance, and explicitly for the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.

The second part, which was much more in line with our style, was to take our energy back to the streets. We, again joined by our allies, held an anti-police-brutality march.

On Saturday, m24, I got to Liberty Square around 11:30am to meet with about 10 other Occupiers, who had also volunteered to act as pacers for the march—folks who would help direct the march, respond to police kettling or obstruction, close gaps and maintain continuity in the middle, and help protect stragglers in the back from getting picked off by police.

We discussed the plan for the day. It would begin in Liberty Square with a series of speakers talking about their personal and communities’ experiences with the NYPD, which mostly consisted of violence and repression. Afterward we would march north on Broadway to Union Square, where a new, 24-hour occupation had been in place since the violent eviction at Liberty Square on m17.

The march route would pass in front of five locations at the heart of New York’s police and jail system—City Hall, 100 Centre Street, aka “the Tombs,” 1 Police Plaza, the Federal Building, and the ICE Detention Center. The exact route would be at the discretion of the pacers at the front of the march, and largely based on how much space the police gave us. Our primary mode of communication with each other was via a private text-message loop, which would help us coordinate throughout the march.

An interesting addition to this march was a group of about 30 folks from Veterans For Peace. They appeared to be somewhere in between their late 50s and late 60s. They were mostly white men and women who had served in the armed forces. Their gray sweatshirts bore their logo, and every one of them had plastic goggles hanging from their necks. They were prepared to be peppered sprayed.

Having seen photos, videos, and reports of the violence the week before, Veterans For Peace reached out to OWS. Not only did they want to march in solidarity with us, they wanted to put themselves on the front lines, or positioned anywhere in the march that we felt was vulnerable. They wanted to stand between us and the police, in order to protect our constitutional rights—to put their bodies on the line and spare us the brutality for one day.

I nearly cried when I saw them gathered on Saturday, and I’m crying now as I think about it. I’m crying because their sacrifice honors and humbles me. And because it didn’t work.

The first speaker of the day was Eric, an organizer and street medic with Occupy Wall Street, who was one of those arrested during the m17 eviction of Liberty Square. Eric chose not to speak of his own experiences, as violent as they were, but instead to connect our current struggle and experiences with those of people who have come before us. With Sean Bell, Troy Davis, Amadou Diallo and so many more black and Latin@ men and women murdered by the NYPD and the police state.

A speaker from the National Lawyers Guild, which provides all of the legal support for Occupy Wall Street, highlighted how some people are treated as criminals based on their actions, but in New York City, the NYPD has criminalized the entire Muslim community simply because of who they are.

City Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez (Democrat, District 10, Manhattan) and Jumaane Williams (Democrat, District 45, Brooklyn), longtime OWS supporters spoke on the history of NYPD violence.

“It is not an accident that all the people killed by the NYPD are black and Latino,” Rodriguez said.

On OWS, Rodriguez asserted, “This movement is the voice of the working and middle classes.”

Councilmember Williams flipped up his hoodie, which he said that he wore in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old black youth murdered by a man in Florida who targeted him because of his clothing and his race. Williams asked those of us with hoodies to put on our hoods as well. We wore them with pride.

It was nearing 1pm, the crowd in Liberty Square had filled out dramatically, energy was building, the sun was shining, and we were ready to march.

The pacers spread out, the drums started to beat, and we marched.

What: Occupy the Mail is a national call to action to stand in solidarity with the United States Postal Service (USPS) workers. The USPS is undergoing major reform, with proposed ideas such as a 50-cent stamp, “changes” to employee health care benefits and cutting up to 150,000 employees through retirement. Occupy the Mail requests that working groups inside of Occupy Wall Street, as well as Occupations nationwide, to take action immediately.

Who: Occupy the Mail’s National Call to Action is for the hundreds of Occupations in the United States to participate. The following idea can be brought to specific working groups or to the general assemblies. The proposal is for each occupation to open a P.O Box—so that occupiers would not have to give out their personal addresses—that the entire occupation could then publicly shout out. Occupiers could then send letters back and forth to one another, in order to update each other on their progress, increase solidarity, and build communication and understanding about the productivity of other occupations.

Where: Occupy the Mail wants to spread across the nation, not only to occupations but to households as well. As the letters get processed and sent across the nation, they will touch the hands of hundreds of USPS employees who will have the opportunity to read the messages of solidarity from the occupiers.

When and Why: A retired member of the United States Postal Service recently came to an Occupy Wall Street General Assembly to ask for solidarity from OWS for a massive USPS action that is taking place on March 17th. The NYCGA reached consensus on the proposal for solidarity. As a show of respect and solidarity, Occupy the Mail thinks that March 17th would be an appropriate day to launch the Occupy the Mail campaign.

How to take action:

• Grab a pen and paper, and start writing letters.
• Address them to friends, family or other occupations.
• In your letters, inform the recipients as to why we stand in solidarity with the USPS.
• Inform the recipient of how hard you are working with your local occupation.
• Seal the letter, and add a personalized message to the USPS from your occupation!

(Postcards are available. For more information email OccupyMailUSPS@gmail.com)

Contact Information:
Email: OccupyMailUSPS@gmail.com
Twitter: Follow @OccupiedMail