Occupy Wall Street Returns to Union Square

Photo: Julia Reinhart

Welcome drummers and clowns and street performers of all varieties - and yes, real activists and protesters too. And with the six month anniversary for OWS on March 17th at Zuccotti park, Occupy was back in business - until the cops kicked them out again on that Saturday night. The Raw Story covers things here with police violence marking the otherwise peaceful protests and bringing back to mind the government oppression of the last days at Zuccotti Park. And so after a full day on the 17th I left at midnight, only to see the protesters physically removed later on TimCast's livestream and an OWS move to Union Square. 

Capt. Ray Lewis

Monday I arrived at Union Square to a more than festive atmosphere. It was like the police had given OWS a gift - a new park to haunt. Befuddled park rangers and police tried their best to deal with a morning crowd, much more spirited than they might have been used to, but somehow in their eyes, you could see they were just waiting for word from above to drop the hammer yet one more time on the Occupy movement. Captain Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia police officer was there, just as he had been at Zuccotti, and a whole new generation of New Yorkers seemed to delight in the idea that the fun had finally reached their neighborhood. Occupy was back. At least in spirit.

Throughout the week, police presence had increased and on Tuesday night, the ritual of barricading the place, a Zuccotti staple of American freedom, had returned. But this time, it was the police barricading themselves into a small portion of the park and forcing the protesters onto the sidewalk, a legal sleeping area in NYC, to look back on the cops and taunt them from the outside. A video of protesters "Cop fishing" with a donut shows the Occupy movement has still not lost its sense of humour. Later in the week, I designed the logo above, based on the idea that people were trying to Trademark the Occupy Wall Street concept but didn't have a logo. I thought this solved the problem nicely - to sort of occupy the legal concept of owning intellectual property. It seems things will just get more interesting as this American spring gets under way.

A Charity Case: Random Thoughts on the Elephant in the Room

On The General Malaise

Nobody wants to be a charity case. I certainly didn't. As opposed to having lost my job in America, I was returning from a prolonged economic crisis overseas to see if I could restart a career stalled by America's bumbling with the Axis of Evil, an ill-conceived foreign policy concept that essentially created three new reasons for three new wars but did nothing except kill business for American companies overseas after 9-11, mine included. I had a company in South Korea, not an Axis country, but all the same, saw business grind to a halt with simply the name Korea being tainted for the then foreseeable future. And so I worked tirelessly to rebound from that over the next ten years. But it didn't work. So I came home. And that hasn't worked either. Yet.

USA: #1 in poverty

But I could never have seen the disaster that would be America on my return. The omnipresence of a repressive police state, the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York spreading country, and indeed worldwide, within weeks of my return. The general depression of the place - Obama all but sold out to the banksters and poverty rapidly rising all across the country with nary a word about it in the national debate - THAT elephant in the room. That 99%. In the graph here, America is #1. #1 in relative poverty worldwide (and Japan or Korea don't even make the list - or anywhere is Asia for that matter) pointing to income disparity being our problem and the difference between collectivist, socialist, and individualistic, capitalist, societies.)

And this week's political distraction being Rush Limbaugh calling a college student a 'slut' as the G8 conference  is quietly moved from Chicago to Camp David under the threat that Chicago could gain it's 1968 notoriety back again with mass protests against both the G8 and NATO summits being held in the city at the same time. Too bad. I hope people hit the streets anyway. It's needed. More needed than ever.

On Being an Educational Tool

I continue to have mixed feelings over this blog being used as a reference for homeless studies (see sidebar above) as I come to see what has become described by some as The Homeless Industrial Complex: "those organizations (who) rely on the continuation of the homeless problem for their own survival; if the homeless problem goes away, so do the donations and grants. The homeless problem will remain intractable until the homeless-industrial complex which sustains it is broken." 

As this blog is used by one arm of Columbia University for research, another, the Columbia Center for the Prevention of Homelessness Studies (CHPS) sites no less than fifty (yes, 50) Ph.D.s proffering to address the homeless issue as well. Now one has to ask themselves, didn't the boss ever come in one morning and give the entire staff a gigantic ass chewing over the dismal state of the numbers? "Look goddamit, we're spending ooddles of grant monies and our work has proved to be completely and totally ineffective! You're all fired!" No. Of course not - because if the boss did that, they might be out on the street as well. And so the system keeps feeding itself. 

For the record, I've contacted CHPS and offered my services as a researcher but have yet to receive any response. Why is it that I imagine a room full of academics pecking away at computers and looking up and saying (in unison), "A real homeless guy, working here? Nah, that wouldn't work".

On The Phone Thing

There is some light at the end of the tunnel here. With a few more expected donations by the end of the week, I should have a phone by the following week. If you can help, please do. I still need to pay the service fee each month of at least $50.

On Work

By the end of this month I will have made nearly $550 honest, writing website copy, beginning a soon to be announced book with a friend and participating in a homeless research study for NYU. But that's a far cry away from being called a living wage, let alone paying rent. Hopefully the phone will take away yet one more invisible wall and get me back on the track to some real work. But to do that means extracting some miniscule percentage from that well entrenched 1%. Better wish me some luck on that. I hear they're holed up at Camp David these days...

To Attribute or Not to Attribute? When the AP Uses Your Writing as a Reference

Photo by Tina Fineberg for the Associated Press

"I'm a reporter with the Associated Press here in NYC. I'm working on a story about the small group of Occupy folks who have been living in various churches since the Zuccotti eviction. I was intrigued by your recent blog post on the subject and was hoping you might be willing to be interviewed for my story." - AP Writer

And so the story begins - or actually,  my story began on December 6 last year with the title: Out Of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire: The Nomadic Life of an #OWS Occupier Sans Occupation, published on this blog, while this week the Associated Press published their version of a very similar story with the title: After Encampment Ends, NYC Occupiers Become Nomads. Of course any similarity between the two titles and stories is purely coincidental, right? Well, not right actually. Wrong actually.

In cases such as this, and especially because the writer specifically referenced this blog in her introductory letter to me, and subsequently interviewed me, the proper journalistic protocol would be to give an attribution in her story to my story or to this blog, thereby giving credit where credit is due. 

Quoting me and having my title referred to as "Unemployed former advertising executive" is not exactly proper attribution. Citing my writing and blog would have been acceptable attribution since both stories use the concept of "Nomads", cover the same subject and my story appeared first. In his book News Reporting and Writing, journalism professor Melvin Mencher states: "Any time the information in your story comes from a source, and not from your firsthand observations, it should be attributed." In our case, the stories are indeed different, but the concept of nomads and general story concept initially came from this blog in relation to the same subject matter so it should have been attributed.

I have contacted the writer but have yet to hear back and I'll pursue as much as possible with AP direct. I'll be interested to see how they handle it, but I hate to see people being paid for doing things I've already done and not being properly attributed. It would also be nice to get paid one day for the writing I do.

Trouble in the Homeless House of #OWS

SPSA

For the past month I have lived at St. Paul & St. Andrew's church (SPSA), one of the churches that OWS uses to house it's members. Recently a large issue has come into play over who is "homeless" and who is not - which seems odd considering that everyone living at the church full-time, truly has nowhere else to go. One guy has a family, but won't stay with them so he is running from something and OWS gives him a place to be. Another guy I know at another church we occupy was essentially homeless before OWS but now, because he has some responsibility, talks as if the homeless are somehow less than he and wants to deny them food and shelter - even if they work for it. Above is a photo of the interior of the church we have lived in for the past month. Lat night we moved into West Park church on W. 86th Street. In some frustration of poor management and even poorer communication amidst the housing group, I penned the following note yesterday to a friend:

"Will be spotty on Internet tonight. Spokes Council meeting at 7:30 at West Park Church. Noted last night at SPSA but no confirmation on new church for tonight. OWS facilitators saying they are not social services and not responsible for homeless. Putting 80-100 people on the line tonight with un-agreed requirements for 'being an occupier' and then leaving decision up to facilitators as to who 'might' get into the new church. Meeting this afternoon with Housing Working Group verging on mutiny. Meeting aborted due to loud arguments, name calling, real internal strife.

And yes. "This is what Democracy looks like". Pushing things to last minute/breaking point is power control device for those in control of information/contacts forcing general populace to vote for rules and amendments they do not agree on in return for shelter and food. Now very divisive with obvious 'anti homeless' bent from leaders. But define homeless? That's what they can't do. OWS succeeded because a standing army of 500 lived in a park - uh, a home. Now park is gone and movement abandons those who made it? That's what's on the table in 1.5 hours. Think I'll attend that meeting. This is defining stuff."

People moved to the new church just fine, but no word on many of the issues from the Housing Working Group that made people upset. That means that I'll be going home to a house divided. Right now, rather than work on the things that brought us to OWS in the first place and are good for the country, it seems we are distracted by simple living details, complicated by unsure management. If you were the opposition to OWS, wouldn't it be best to confuse them at the core of their existence - their home? That's a thought that has been floated as of late. Trojan horses sit right in the square and nobody sees them for what they are.

On a better note, Michael Moore attended Spokes Council last night and sat quietly throughout the meeting. After the meeting he spoke at some length and was pretty inspiring. His main point and basic pep talk was that in just three months, Occupy had made a larger impact on society than any movement before had from racial equality to ending the Vietnam war in the same period of time. That seemed to be much more worth thinking about than all the internal strife that had a house divided for the week prior.

Out Of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire: The Nomadic Life of an #OWS Occupier Sans Occupation

Native America

My exit from the New York City 30th St. Men's shelter (Bellevue) on November 3rd was uneventful. Resolved maybe. It wasn't so hard to choose not to have one's psyche attacked by the government and the myriad of insane laws against the homeless in search of more US budget cutting as cities spend millions to rid their centers of anti-corporate/government 'Occupations'. It made a lot more sense to become an occupier of public spaces, instead of remaining a prisoner in them. Why not build a teepee on Wall Street and really piss em' off? When one has nothing to loose they don't feel so much revolutionary but rather evolutionary - the old rules having outgrown any usefulness and a set of new ones just waiting to be written. When the government criminalizes the state of not being able to make enough money to survive in even a modicum of decency (click prior for Huffington Post story), one doesn't feel so much like an outlaw as they might feel like a pioneer - breaking ground that will not be common for quite some time, but common to be - just getting there first.

The Beginning of the Beginning

The police raid of the Occupy Wall St. camp in the early hours of November 15th came at just the right time, a time when the movement was running out of steam and festering in its own philosophical excrement. "Time to put that rubber to the road boys", said the government. (Continued...)

This blog. aHBiNYC is now available as an eBook. It covers the writer's homeless experiences in New York City from September 11, 2011 through January 2013 in 245 pages and 50 chapters. To order simply use the PayPal button in the sidebar, send $10, and include your email address in the PayPal memo form. Thank you.

Homeless 101.8: New York Mayor Bloomberg Declares War On the Homeless!

And the 12th richest man in America means business. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, under Bloomberg's tutelage "The total homeless shelter population is 33% higher than when he (Bloomberg) took office and the number of homeless families is 45% higher." So Mike's not messing around. A guy like that lives in a pretty nice house so it's fairly obvious that he really doesn't like people who live in much less. "New York's a classy city", he said, "and having all these bums, and families and children on the street just doesn't look good - so let's put em' where we don't see em'". Out of site, out of mind. That's the Bloomberg plan. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the bible of America's 1% wealthiest, "The number of people in New York City's homeless-shelter population exceeded 40,000 last week for the first time, capping a rapid rise in homeless children and families since the spring when the city eliminated a rent subsidy program, according to a report to be released Wednesday. Mr. Bloomberg had earlier set a goal in 2004 of cutting both the number of people who sleep on the streets and use the shelter system by two-thirds by 2009, but neither pledge has been fulfilled." Instead, in measures more draconian than used on the Occupy Wall Street protesters this week, Mr. Bloomberg simply ignored his own promises and his dismal record on the issue. "Getting rid of those protesters was cheap. Housing 40,000 homeless will cost about a billion-five a year, but that's better than having them on the street", he said. "Looks nice around here, doesn't it?"

Homeless 101.3: "Are you bitter yet?"



Hugh MacLeod

 I was asked this one day by the boys in my room at the shelter. "Are you bitter yet?", Guy said. They had seen me come home from a less than good day in a fairly bitchy mood. And I joked with them back, “Bitter, no. Jaded for sure”. But on that day rule #1 of homeless 101 was solidified. Don’t trust anyone. Douglas,the man with Heritage Health and Housing and the man who picked me up initially at the airport had turned his card being a good but senseless administrator and screwed me out of $100 a month. $100 of my money. Never mind how he did it – explaining the ins and outs of this fucked-up system is even way too tedious for this blog and its dedicated readership. The point here is that he had a choice, and he could have done something that helped someone, yes, in this case me. But instead, he behaved like too many cogs in too many clattering social machines behave and did something that served him and his organization well, but not the people well.

I hope he enjoys the $100 in loan money he denied me from my government. Bet he had a cold one on me this weekend. Asshole. But assholes are in no short supply in these waters. In my second week, two sweaters were stolen from on top of my locker. We are told not to leave things there, but I had made a mistake. The sweaters had become damp in a rain. Am I bitter yet? Not yet. I worry about becoming institutionalized to the point that I say I am bitter though. Tonight at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration a man came up to me and said he had become a follower of this blog. He called the work being done here, “Path breaking”. I was taken aback a bit so I queried him some on what he meant. “Path breaking?”, I said. “I had someone else tell me that this is the first blog to address homelessness in an articulate and lighthearted manner. But I couldn’t believe that no one had ever done this before”. “No one has”, he returned. “What you are doing is needed. It’s fresh. It’s honest. It’s path breaking.”

Another woman who visits me at Zuccotti, a psychiatrist, has told me a similar thing. She wants to get me together with a professor friend of hers at Columbia on the homeless subject and see if we can do a New York Times story together. I would like that. So I’m not bitter quite yet. Taking whatever this is by the horns. Owning it. Writing it. Not dwelling on it but creating through it is a platform I could have never ordered. But a platform I would be terribly remiss in not addressing. There are people to be helped here. And there’s something artistic about seeing and experiencing something for the first time. You see it as you will never see it again. Henry Miller said it this way: "Lifes becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show." And so that’s all I do. That and live.

One of my favorite signs at the demonstration says, “The beginning is near”. I like that. I hope it is correct. Because I’m not bitter yet. Pissed off sometimes. But not quite yet bitter. Yet.

Homeless 101.2: Happy, Scared, Known, Worried, Engaged, Hopeful, Resolved

Photo by Bryan Derballa for the Wall Street Journal

My friend says I have now been outed. Today's Wall Street Journal online features a slideshow on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstration in which I 'occupy' slide #4. It's a lovely shot and it features this blog address prominently. It also hits the point of the occupation square on the head. Why are able-minded people out of work? Hits here have gone over 500 today. But is it the kind of press I need to get a job? An old line says that any press is good press so I'm going to play it that way. I do indeed live in a homeless shelter and you don't get to be in the Wall Street Journal every day. But that's where the worry begins. Will my Back To Work program see it as a productive way to go about finding work (All of my social programs could be cut if any one of them takes issue with me for any reason - and reasons can always be manufactured)? Is street theatre the kind of job hunting that will pass the system's muster. I doubt it, but it's part of my arsenal as a creative business person and to not use it would be more of a crime than most of my roommates in the shelter have committed. (Continued...)

This blog. aHBiNYC is now available as an eBook. It covers the writer's homeless experiences in New York City from September 11, 2011 through January 2013 in 245 pages and 50 chapters. To order simply use the PayPal button in the sidebar, send $10, and include your email address in the PayPal memo form. Thank you.

A Homeless Blogger In NYC Occupies Wall Street

Brush with the law

Do I protest the system that both messed me up and partially supports me? One answer: "Yes". It's the only sensible thing to do. The only way to contribute to ending a system that gives back very little to those who support it - those 99% who don't share the wealth of the 1% who control it. I saw a sign at the protest recently  that said, "The System's Not Broken. It Was Built This Way" - and that's a sorry damned comment on the whole mess, because it might be true. And so in whatever hours I can, on nights and weekends, I Occupy Wall Street, along with thousands of others, to effect the change we elected, but didn't get. Unfortunately, the first thing Obama did was bail out the banks - while the rest of America, the tax base, was left hanging. Obama, for whatever we thought we bought, sold us out. And that's sad again because I supported him, as did much of the world.

McLuhan lives!

And so I paint. In my teens I taught myself to paint signs, because I loved typography and eventually ended up working as a professional sign painter to pay for college. It was a good job, much better for me than working at Mickey D's, and the solitude of the work was always peaceful for me. It is again. I haven't lettered in 35 years. I had forgotten the meditation it provided - to think of something, to design it in my head, and then to put it to surface. The end result is never the work itself. It's the reaction it gets from others. And that feeds both the artist and the viewer. Lovely. The work is all freehand and done from a scratchy ball pen thumbnail. Making it bigger is the actual art. The sign you see says, "The Medium Is Our Message". It is paraphrased from a Marshall McLuhan expression. In this case, I meant it to describe what the demonstration in Zuccotti park is all about. About the idea of expressing ideas by assembling, and creating mass communication (The business I ended up in.). The medium is the gathering and the signs and the message is simply whatever people take from it. Not a list of demands, not a manifesto, not a protest - but a gathering together to exercise the rights of our first amendment. That's the message.

If the painting looks better at the start than it does at the finish, that's because it was painted three times. Once on Friday evening. Then again on Saturday, because the tempera paint was washed away by the rain overnight. Then again on Sunday, because it was washed away a second time. Finally on Sunday, I switched to acrylic paint that could survive the rain. For that, I had to use colours that were less brilliant, but stable after drying. It went from graphic design to street art for all the repaints, and somehow, it works that way. Maybe I could get a job being a signpainter again - if this homeless writer thing doesn't work out :)

Homeless 101.1: Is Homelessness a Crime in America?

Homeless America

At the 30th Street Men's Shelter in Manhattan one would certainly think so as truly homeless people are treated just like and along with criminals of a number of varieties. At the corner of the building hangs a sign pointing to the entrance. "Intake and Vagrancy Control", it reads. Upon entering all items must be removed from pockets, belts and watches removed and put in trays for x-ray. Then the 'clients' (as residents are duplicitously called) pass through a metal detector and are whisked with a wand if anything beeps. A combination of DHS (Department of Homeless Services) Police and rent-a cops patrol every inch of the place and one is never out of the view of security at any time, except when in a bunk room - but the bunk rooms have not locks or latches. "You watch your shit here, boy", said a guard to me. "We've got crooks and scammers and pimps and drug runners and more in here. You watch your shit all the time", he said in regard to anything I might be carrying. It applies to your behaviour as well. (Continued...)

This blog. aHBiNYC is now available as an eBook. It covers the writer's homeless experiences in New York City from September 11, 2011 through January 2013 in 245 pages and 50 chapters. To order simply use the PayPal button in the sidebar, send $10, and include your email address in the PayPal memo form. Thank you.

I 'Occupied Wall St.' Today. You Should Too

Posters Squared

Yesterday police arrested 80 people for marching from the Occupy Wall St. site at Zuccotti Park to Union Square in New York. They pepper sprayed protesters and generally made a mess of things whilst giving the movement some much needed publicity. Today things were much more calm after a ton of bad press for the NYPD in main stream media (MSM). In the park was music, food and plenty of friendly and interesting people. Also, plenty of cardboard and markers and paint were available for poster making. The grounds are covered with thousands of posters made by participants supporting the event, now in day 10. See OccupyWallSt.org. I sat next to a girl from Bahrain who was making peace posters and answered questions from a Chinese student as to how democracy and freedom of speech should and are now working in America. I made two posters. I got paint on my hands. And I saw a few thousand other people who feel as I do about the current state of the broken American economic machine. It's not working well for us. But today made me feel as if it can change. It was nice. It was liberating. It was my America back again - and why I'm back home again.

"Occupy Wall Street" Protesters Stage Intervention on the American Financial/Political Complex

Make Jobs Not War

According to CBS News protesters have been occupying Wall Street and surrounding streets since Saturday in an effort to call attention to the real terrorists of the world financial crisis - the banks themselves.I and a friend walked down Sunday to lend support only to find the police had blocked off Wall Street itself and shuttled them into less obvious areas. We found a town hall meeting with protesters in a small park featuring a speaker with a bullhorn and a rather calm and reasoned discussion of the current financial mess. Whatever suspension of disbelief the participants might have originally brought to the subject of the financial crisis was firmly dissolved and replaced by indignant condemnation of the unhealthy bed partners of big bank business (read Goldman Sachs) and government. Geithner and Paulson as wolves guarding the hen house comes to mind.