#Zuccotti

[climatecalling]

It shouldn't be "Vote Blue no matter who" which is gross, but "Don't let Red get elected fer chrissakes."

And "Change the Democratic party from the bottom up with grassroots organizing to support leftists and progressives and help them rise through the ranks so they can run successfully for President and other powerful positions while at the same time agitating to engage the public to get involved to make this happen while also working to overthrow Capitalism" though that's not very catchy.

The time to oppose Biden for someone better has long passed. We're stuck with Biden or Trump. And as actually genocidal as Biden is, he is still objectively better than Trump, who will destroy the earth and harm literally everyone, first and especially the most vulnerable. We have no choice at this moment in history but to hold our noses and support Biden.

The strategy of undermining centrist and conservative Democrats on the theory that it will push the party to the left has never worked. It has only elected Republicans and strengthened their power.

[crimethinc]

Thirteen years ago today, a thousand demonstrators descended on Wall Street, occupying Zuccotti Park and kicking off what came to be known as the Occupy movement. Revisiting that moment, we can see how dramatically the terrain of social movements has changed as our society has polarized.

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed to create a movement that could bring all society together against the ruling order and the few who profit from it, mobilizing under the slogan “We are the 99%.” Today, the divisions that cut through our society have only deepened, rendering it more difficult to imagine social change. Now, the capitalist order is not stabilized by the illusion of general consent, but rather by the looming threat of violent conflict.

Yet if anything, this only renders it more important to learn from and experiment with the legacy of the Occupy movement today.

https://crimethinc.com/Occupy2024

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Monday, 5/27 at 2pm, Zuccotti Park, Broadway and Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan

[catdotjpeg]

On #InternationalWomensDay New Yorkers mobilized in Union Square to raise the struggle of our sisters in Palestine. As we flooded the streets in defiance of the riot cops mobilized against us, the NYPD reacted more aggressively than before — arresting over 30 people in 5 hours. Minutes after the action started, a zionist provocateur entered the crowd. When confronted, he pushed a WOL organizer in the chest. While protesters attempted to eject him from the crowd, NYPD formed a wall to protect him and ignored that he physically assaulted a woman. The same cops threatened to arrest the same woman for initially using a mic to deliver a speech from Palestinian women in Gaza. Despite NYPD threats to arrest us, we read the statement using the people’s mic, reverberating the words of our sisters through the streets. As we made our way south from Union Square, the NYPD’s James McCarthy and Timothy Beaudette were laser focused on preventing us from taking the streets, even though the march was too large to fit on the sidewalk. As we have seen time and time again, the people are fully capable of outsmarting, outrunning, and outmaneuvering the most well-funded police force in the world. We were fully on the street when we crossed Cooper Union. Scattered arrests occurred by then + the SRG Biker Squad started cutting into our lines attempting to break us apart. This did not have the intended effect, as we are not afraid of one large march being split into several. One section of the march stormed the Oculus despite SRG’s attempts to lock the doors. The other section winded its way through Manhattan before both linking up at Zuccotti Park, where protestors noticed Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry and began chanting at him until he retreated. By the time we closed out ~30 people were arrested. Once again, NYPD beat women unconscious, threw them to the pavement, & we have seen reports of people being beaten inside a police vehicle. Pedestrian bikers who were not part of the protest were ripped off their bicycles by Chief James McCarthy and thrown to the floor. Once the rally dispersed and protestors went to jail support, cops once again engaged in a riot at 1 Police Plaza. Several people who were there to support the arrestees were themselves arrested for the crime of standing on the sidewalk or crossing the street in a crosswalk. Never forget that on International Women’s Day, the NYPD beat women until they were unconscious, the week that the ACLU settlement, meant specifically to restrict the police from engaging in the kinds of actions they use at many of our rallies, was intended to go into effect. We call on all supporters of Palestine to REFUSE to normalize with the forces of repression: REFUSE photo-ops during Ramadan with the Mayor’s Office, rip up your White House Iftar invitation, make a commitment to refuse getting permits for all demonstrations. The struggle to #FreePalestine requires unity in non-normalization with the entities financing and sponsoring our people’s genocide. Do anything and everything you can to build the capacity of our movement to sustain itself and survive this moment.

-- Within Our Lifetime, 9 Mar 2024

[catdotjpeg]

Some B&W shots from the protest in Zuccotti Park.

-- BanthaFodderDan, 20 Mar 2024

The action, organized by Within Our Lifetime, included a march from Zuccotti Park to confronting Mayor Eric Adams, who was holding an iftar party at New York City Hall. Organizers and participants, including press, were targeted for arrest.

[catdotjpeg]

🌱 Palestine is everywhere reports: Some photos from the end of Day 1 at the people’s park (aka zuccotti park). A library has been established. Soccer, frisbee, chess, hot food, conversation, dancing, artmaking, and more.

-- Within Our Lifetime, 1 Apr 2024

[dailyallthingsjerryschilling]

"Elvis & Nixon" Premiere - 2016 Tribeca Film Festival

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 18: Alex Pettyfer (L) and executive producer Jerry Schilling attend the "Elvis & Nixon" premiere during the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival at John Zuccotti Theater at BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center on April 18, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images)

[catdotjpeg]

The Emergency Action for Gaza that started at Bowling Green has arrived at Zuccotti Park and plans to stay the night. Colored flares briefly lit up the privately managed FiDi Plaza, famed site of Occupy Wall Street, and where an autonomous zone demo was swept earlier this week.

-- PRO_NYC, 5 Apr 2024

[wraithclatter]

📝Journal entry: 9/18/24

🌡: ~85°

Weather: 🌥

🌕phase: 🌒wax. Cresc. In ♈

The Ouroboros of Consumer Culture:

Nose and ear shearers are a sham. You cut hairs in parts of your body that grow back twice as thick, fucking pointless but I digress-

So the idea is to keep people locked into buying these products for an indefinite, ritually compulsed exercise in futility(to say nothing of planned obselesence). So much of the modern american ideal is based on this mechanism; paying an arm and a leg for bread and circuses or hooked into buying cheap carnival toys, paying someone to jingle their car-keys in front of your face. The same annoying but well-meaning(at least at the time)protestors from the original Occupy movement days now run laps around Zuccotti Park sharing their fit-bit data to twatter, hash-tag mic-check, hash tag solidarity. Little do they know, writhing in the smallest regions of their guts, a machine-god spies on them through their blood: amassing any activity and energy it can extract and recruiting other like nano-tech constituencies(thanks, Charles Lieber!)and accompanying radiations to slurp up all available bio-mass for the same reason a dog pisses on a fire-hydrent.

[catdotjpeg]

In response to the zionist entity’s siege of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in North Gaza on Sunday, we called for an emergency action alongside Healthcare Workers for Palestine to show the world that New York stands against the ongoing genocide and its continuous escalations. This was the first protest [Within Our Lifetime] hosted during the month of Ramadan this year, marked by grief and loss as the people of Gaza are continually starved, displaced, murdered, and tortured while Palestinians are banned from entering Masjid Al-Aqsa to pray. Before the rally began, journalists filmed dozens of cops dressed in riot gear all around Zuccotti Park. The moment we started chanting, NYPD’s Timothy Beaudette attempted to put on a show of force by barging through the crowd and threatening to arrest organizers for allegedly using sound amplification devices. We continued to lead chants and raise our voices for Palestine unbothered and began marching shortly thereafter. As soon as the march began, police attacked protestors indiscriminately and targeted multiple WOL organizers for arrest, hoping to decapitate the march by disappearing its leaders. One of the arrestees was Abdullah Akl, a prominent Muslim youth leader within the community and in WOL. It is not lost on us that he was arrested during Ramadan, while he was fasting along with many of our brothers and sisters at protests, throughout the city, and in Palestine. Even though Abdullah was still in police custody during Iftar, the police refused to allow him and other Muslim arrestees to break their fasts. As the protest continued, the flood split into several streams around lower Manhattan. Eventually, everyone reconvened, taking the streets and sidewalks outside of Eric Adams’ Iftar dinner, a desperate attempt to tokenize Muslims and co-opt the community’s faith to whitewash his unbridled support for genocide and contempt of Muslim political expression. As we protested, we broke our fast with water and dates on the streets of our city and continued chanting against the fascist, zionist mayor. A community member came out after disrupting the event and informed us that there were hardly any Muslims present at all. Even this desperate photo-op was a bust, showing that our people will not stand with genocide supporters and will not give them any opportunity to use us for political points.

Police—dressed in full riot gear, brandishing batons and shields—continually threatened protestors during and after Iftar, pushing barricades in on us and attempting to kettle us (an illegal policing tactic) multiple times. Eventually, they even called a Level 3 mobilization (the second highest for the NYPD, which requires all special units to be called into the area as squad cars are sent out from every command center in the city). No matter what they tried, however, our people's will and determination to flood New York for Gaza prevailed and we successfully protested the event until its conclusion, at which point we shamed the genocide normalizers who were leaving the Iftar dinner, all while the entire area was shut down due to an abundance of officers crowding the street desperately trying to keep us on the sidewalk.

As Eric Adams + other zionists host normalization events to save their tarnished image with the Muslim community, his foot soldiers are targeting Muslim protestors + leaders, arbitrarily arresting them, and denying them the right to break their fast + observe their traditions. The NYPD threatens us as we chant, pray, and break our fast. They dress up in riot gear to counter a flood of protestors using only our voices as we fight against the genocide of our people in Gaza and zionist politicians’ attempts to tokenize our community. During our first protest during the holy month of Ramadan, city government officials and the NYPD made clear to us their disdain for the Muslim community and the values of liberation and justice that we stand for. We have no illusions about who these so-called “leaders” are and what they stand for. We will continue to flood New York for Palestine and stand against the fascist politicians who attack us on the streets as they fund the attacks on our people in Gaza.

-- Within Our Lifetime, 21 Mar 2024

[thetowers]

Photo by Gretchen So. This is the scene of Liberty Plaza Park, which was destroyed along with the towers on 9-11. A new, open to the public yet privately-owned, park sits in its place today called Zuccotti Park. Liberty Plaza Park was the original home of the Double Check Statue created by John Seward Johnson. Double Check is the only surviving relic of the original Park and can be visited in today's space.

After 9-11 the park was in ruins, but Double Check the statue made it through.

[ariaboughton]

— BASICS

Name: Aria Boughton Age / D.O.B.: 27 / July 9th, 1996 Gender, Pronouns & Sexuality: cis woman, she/her, lesbian Hometown: Geraldton, Western Australia; Moved to Hackensack, New Jersey at age 11 Affiliation: Media / Syndicate Job position: Photojournalist @ The New York Times Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Communication from NYU Relationship status: Single-ish Children: None Positive traits: Resourceful, Ambitious, Loyal, Diplomatic, Discreet Negative traits: Gullible, Obsessive, Insecure, Disorganized, Confrontational

— BIOGRAPHY

By the time her parents moved her to the states, Aria was a little eleven year old spitfire. Her father had to follow where the money was, and the money was apparently some well-off business that, at the time, she didn’t quite understand. From out of the heat and into the freezer, Aria had a harder time adjusting than she would have liked to admit and spent most of her middle school years keeping quiet and without very many friends. Most of it, of course, was stubbornness and protest. She had friends back in Australia and she refused to forget about them.

She grew out of that in high school, slotting right into extracurriculars — yearbook and student council — and making the friends she’d been without for so long. Aria attributes her time and effort spent there as where it all began for her, but truly it was hearing her parents talk about the protests in Zuccotti Park. Her father, having built somewhat of a name for himself in his company, had dismissed the protesters as nothing more than ‘dirty hippies’. Aria, though, found herself glued to the TV and to her laptop, looking at the photos of what these people were doing and how they were doing it.

Three years later, the summer after she graduated high school, another movement began. While unrest in Ferguson rocked the nation and brought attention to the injustice Black people experienced at the hands of the police— Aria found herself wanting to document every second of it. She knew that if no one wrote the articles, took the photos, captured video of every moment on the streets - history would erase every moment. It was there that she realized that this was her calling. She wanted to bring attention to what she could, when she could, and use her photos as a vehicle to tell the stories that needed to be told.

Her acceptance to NYU was a shock to both her and her parents, and while she and her father had grown distant over the years due to their differing opinions, he still showed up for her and promised to support her financially through it.

A year before she graduated college, she participated in the 2017 Women’s March and the photos she took there elevated her name further than she thought was possible. It gave her opportunities even before she’d managed to get her degree, and allowed her to begin her freelancing career in photojournalism almost immediately after graduation.

For a few years, she stayed with it, but grew increasingly frustrated with freelance pay and sought out something more stable. Her photos over the years of protests and marches were able to land her the job at the New York Times, but she’s already itching to find her next big break. Currently, she’s extremely interested in what The Brotherhood is doing, interested in their philosophy and what they stand for.

DEC. 2023 UPDATE:

Halloween turned her world upside down. After following her friend, Asa Holland, down into The Arène and subsequently being caught by Samar Burman - Aria's been quickly and swiftly brought into the Syndicate as a punishment for knowing too much and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She now works as an affiliate for the Syndicate, but is falling apart at the seams due to the intensity of it and her own mental health making it difficult to function through her fear. Time will tell if she learns to fit in.

As of right now, she feels completely and utterly alone and unsure where to turn.

— WANTED CONNECTIONS / PLOTS

WORK CONNECTION; someone she’s run into from time to time during her experience as a freelancer. they were a freelancer at the same time as she was and they have a bit of friendly rivalry of sorts

CONTACTS; she can always use more contacts for her work. those who give her a heads up or two to get in position before the rest, all to get the photos that can make or break a story

MENTOR TYPE (0/1); someone who’s been around the block, working for and in mainstream media for a few years and has taken aria under their wing to help her navigate the ins and outs of the industry when she first joined. they’re close friends as of now, even if they may work for different organizations

PLATONIC SOULMATE (0/1); a friend from college that she’s lost touch with but now are reuniting. they bonded through being in SHADES, a queer student-led club for students of color and their allies. this connection must be a queer moc!

CLIENTS; people who aria might have photographed outside of her work with the times and freelancing - these are people who have hired her for her more expensive side work as a boudoir photographer. most of her work there is more sensual with a tad bit darker undertones. she would not be a wedding, graduation, etc. type of photographer unless it was when she was first getting started!

MORE TO COME.

[arctic-hands]

I remember my first real protest was during the Occupy movement. I was seventeen and obvs couldn't go to New York even if I had the health for it, luckily I had a liberal, borderline leftist and poor father who was also fed up with all the economic bullshit who could drive me to the solidarity protest in Indianapolis.

I was so excited. I made a protest sign that was painted over an old Hillary '08 sign we still had, with some years-old wall paint from a can we had after my mom repainted the bathroom, and some of her Apple Barrel acrylics. It talked about how I was worried about my future as a poor and sick (and gay? I don't remember if I put that on the sign) young person. This was still when I would be still denied health insurance since I've been diagnosed sick since age 8, and we didn't know what would happen to my Medicaid when I became an adult the next year.

Knowing what was going down in Zuccotti Park, my father took me to Lowes to buy some (much too small) zip ties as a symbolic gesture should we be arrested. "I brought my own!" I would defiantly say when the police arrested me. My father made a sign too, but I don't remember what it said. Anyway, the first day of Occupy Indy, we got up early (a chore for me in those pre-coffee days) and loaded up our signs into the truck and started the hour and a half drive to Indianapolis. My father said we couldn't participate in the planned overnight campout in front of the governor's mansion because of my health problems, but that we'd go back to Indy every day. My mom didn't come. She was worried that, since she was a immigrant (from Europe), she would be in more legal trouble than us even if she did have a green card.

Anyway, Occupy Indy was a complete cluster fuck. It was–and I say this as a white person and that I am in no way No True Scotsman'ing to set myself apart from this–completely white led and led by middle class whites, mostly women, who had no real stakes in the game and were essentially LARPing social justice. We were divided into groups, all of them led by white women of varying stages of adulthood. Mine was led by a middle aged white woman. This was immediately after the Obama government drone-striked anwar al-awalki, an American terrorist part of al-qaeda. Yes he was a terrorist, but he was also an American citizen and at the time even American terrorists were supposed to have due process, unlike their foreign counterparts. The drone killing of al-awalki and his sixteen year old son were loudly decried in the U.S. and abroad as extrajudicial killings.

Anyway, an older, taller Black man, with a sparse grey beard, in our group started talking about this, how if the Obama administration and the U.S. government at large could kill an American citizen, no matter how terrible, without the American having any legal protection or chance to prove their innocence, what's to stop the American government from killing or arresting any citizen, home or abroad, with no due process? Indeed, not too long after this Obama signed the National Defence Authorization Act 2012, which allowed for the indefinite detention without due process for any American suspected of terrorism, with no legal protection and almost certainly a one-way ticket to Gitmo. To my knowledge, that policy is still in effect.

Anyway, our middle aged, middle class white woman "leader" literally told this Black man to shut up, that it wasn't part of the conversation or protest at large. I could tell he was angry, but what could a Black man, even an older Black man, do to go against a white woman who could very easily claim he was threatening her? I didn't understand that fully, it probably took me until the murder of Mike Brown to fully comprehend that notion, that a Black person could be taken down with no recourse just because a white person felt threatened by their presence. But still, I was angry. I had been listening and nodding along to the man because I, having been a news hound since I was 8, knew about the drone strike and the abhorrent politics and illegality of it. I wanted the man to talk about it, because what he said was a warning that indeed came true.

I didn't speak up. I like to think I would have, had my now-self been there instead of my timid seventeen year old self. But maybe I would still be just as likely to kowtow, however reluctantly, to the middle-class white person who was our self-proclaimed leader. The Black man, whose name I never knew, on top of being angry also looked as disappointed as I felt. He walked away from the group and I didn't see him again. I wish I had followed him, either to leave the protest in disgust too or to keep talking to him, but I did neither.

Anyway it just for worse from there. I don't even remember what the woman said after that, it was completely meaningless and hollow. Eventually after our group discussions (where the woman dominated the entire "discussion" and nobody else spoke out), we all formed a crowd again to hear a younger middle class white woman speak at the podium, where she thanked Indianapolis P.D. for keeping us safe and for keeping order. This was at the same time the Zuccotti Park protesters were being brutalized on the daily. I don't remember if Occupy U.C. Davis had already happened, where the officer john "Sargent Pepper" pike had brutally pepper sprayed in the faces a group of protesters who had been peacefully sitting down. I don't remember what this other white woman, a college student, said, it was just as meaningless as our group leader's talk.

I do remember at some point the crowd started to get a little riled up and started chanting at the police officers "protecting us", and the crowd was pushing me along and I was a bit scared, either of potential police brutality or a crowd crush. But then some older white man dressed straight out of the hippie movement started singing "Give Peace A Chance" and that was enough for the crowd to disperse.

Anyway my father and I were so disgusted by the "protest" that we left well before the march to the governor's mansion and stopped for a bite to eat at some restaurant I don't remember before making the drive home, and we didn't go back.

This regaling of the story isn't about Poor Timid White Person guilt, or as said above a No True Scotsman "I'm the real white ally" thing. I wanted to talk about it because I've seen a lot of discussions about white/upper class/upperclass white people co-opting protests in the name of a being allies (some of which I didn't reblog because they were image-heavy and difficult to caption), and it reminded me of this. Hell, even in Zuccotti Park itself, the encampment was divided through the middle within a week or two between the poor and disenfranchised who spent their last few dollars to get to New York City to support the movement they believed could make a change, and the middle and upperclass protesters who had less to lose when N.Y.P.D sent in N.Y.F.D to destroy the encampment and everyone's tents and possessions.

Anyway, I kept following Occupy Indy's facebook page for a while afterwards. Within a year it gear shifted to Tea Party claptrap before I unfollowed. Make of that as you will.

[matthewgallaway]

Yesterday I went downtown to my office (which is in a building that’s a good example of Death Star Architecture), which I’ve only done a handful of times in the past few years. Technically my company is ‘hybrid’ but in reality it’s more like ‘do what you want,’ which I suspect is how most companies in Manhattan are, given that the streets aren’t that crowded, at least compared to how it was pre-pandemic. I’ve read a lot of articles touting the benefits of in-office work, but I’m skeptical. I think there are many industries where it’s just not necessary anymore, and nine out of ten workers prefer being remote most of the time. (As for the one out of ten, you know who you are.) Anyway, I can’t believe that I used to take the subway twice a day at a minimum. I LOVE the subway in theory but it only takes a few rides to remember the stress: trying to get somewhere and the door jams like twenty times at.every.station, not knowing whether to cross the platform because PA doesn’t work, and some dude is blasting ____ from his seat right next to you. I know that the lack of office workers is bad for the city coffers, which is bad for all of the different (good) agencies that depend on that money like the NYPL (library) whose budget is being slashed because Eric Adams believes in funding one (bad) agency above all others. Because the streets are relatively empty, there’s a deflated quality that at first felt a little unsettling — and the tourists really stick out now — and maybe a little sad, because it’s just not as frenetic or electric as it was. Zuccotti Park, which was the base of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 seemed small and quiet. Plus it was like sixty degrees and sunny in February, which no. But in a way I thought it was comforting that the city streets were sad because the whole world feels sad to me these days, and maybe Ground Zero (which is right around the corner from my office) can be rebranded as Ground Zero for Sadness and we can start being a little more honest about how to make things less sad. (Like funding the subway system so that it works and is FREE to ride and charging cars a LOT to drive into the city.) But I should also say that the subway at rush hour wasn’t that crowded, which didn’t make me sad at all, and I laughed when I saw a person reading a hardcover book with a dust jacket because it just seemed so gigantic.

[k00318758]

Paula Zuccotti: Behind the Scenes

During my artist research, I discovered Paula Zuccotti who focused on the art of everyday. This artwork really resonated with my thoughts for my project, as I am focusing on everyday routines. Her project consisted of asking random people to accumulate a list of things they touched everyday, such as recipes and train tickets. Her work made me understand the difference of individuals daily lives, and how each person experiences a complete different day to one another. Her work made me want to focus in on the smaller details of my everyday like instead of the bigger routine steps.

[k00322295]

Artist Research

Paula Zuccotti

I researched the ethnographer and trends forecaster, Paula Zuccotti. Paula wrote the book "Everything we Touch". Her reasoning for writing this book was when she questioned herself "What's the first thing we touch when we wake?", "how do our favourite things reveal our hopes and maybe our fears?", "Can objects tell the story of our lives?".

When I first saw Paula's work I was immediately interested in the concept of this book "Everything we touch" that she wrote. While researching I got the idea to maybe take this idea of taking account of objects that my younger brother touches every day.