New York City General Assembly: March 15th, 2012

Here’s what NYCGA.net has listed for tonight:

• Dallas C has a proposal entitled “A1 Action” — in other words, an action to take place on April 1st. It would involve twin marches in commemoration of the 6-month anniversary of the well-publicized mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. The two marches would end in Brooklyn for “an all-city GA which all GAs in the NYC metropolitan area are invited to participate in. No specifics on how the march from Liberty Square would get to Brooklyn – nor whether marchers would use the pedestrian walkway or the roadway.
• The TechOps working group have a proposal entitled “OWS Newsletter Project,” which asks the General Assembly to empower the Accounting working group to give TechOps access to the email addresses of people who have donated to Occupy Wall Street. They’d use these emails to share the OWS newsletter with donors. “We think that people who have donated will appreciate a weekly update on what the movement is up to, but of course they will have the ability to opt-out at any time.”
• Sean McKeown’s proposal, called Exclusion Principle, describes emergent benefits of “participation in Occupy Wall Street” and states that any person or entity who violates the OWS Principles of Solidarity or Statement of Autonomy “must” make effort “to heal the breach and repair the harm if such repair is possible”. If this is refused, Sean lays out a “shunning”-based process for exclusion and denial of the benefits enumerated earlier. The crux:
  

  Actions taken by an individual shall be seen to be against the Movement as a whole only if they are grievous in nature, or both harmful and systemically repetitive.  The line in the sand between the individual and the Occupy Wall Street movement is drawn by that individual themselves, by their failure to abide by our standards of behavior or community agreements which have achieved consensus in the General Assembly, and a proposal to the General Assembly to formally recognize that an individual stands outside of Occupy Wall Street by their own choice and their own actions should abide by that decision on their part and ratify it lest the individual continue to harm those within the Movement or the Movement as a whole via their actions.

  The mechanism Occupy Wall Street can apply to enforce this separation is simple: for access to resources, we offer none; for access to ourselves, our time, and our systems, we agree to shun the individual as a whole body rather than continue to interact.

• Sebastian Chavez brings a “Proposal For the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street to endorse the Everything for Everyone Festival planned in Seattle, Washington”. The proposal states that the Everything for Everyone Festival will “provide a space for the new culture, the new philosophy, and new politics in its diversity and complexity” and aims “to bring together art, music, workshops, philosophers, and encompassing participation from attendees.”
• Last but not least, Rabbi Chaim Gruber’s Principles of Solidarity working group brings an “Anti-Violence Statement”, a treatise on the importance of non-violent protest which he’d like the GA to approve. The proposal notes that Rabbi Gruber previously left OWS due to “violence” – this occurred December 13th, following Chaim accusing Occupy Wall Street of “promoting death” due to the Duarte Square Reoccupation plan that was attempted on December 17th.Livetweets from that night show the Rabbi’s grievances specifically pertained to taking action against a religious institution (Trinity Wall Street), although many observe that Trinity is more of a real estate company than a church, and OWS was recently – if indirectly – vindicated when half of Trinity’s vestry recently resigned over its failure to prioritize its religious mission.

The fun gets going around 7pm, so watch this page for the Livestream and for the usual @LibertySqGA tweets to the right.