Occupy Everywhere - Sept 17th - Day of Rage Against Wall Street and what it stands for!

[Magda Hassan]

Pepper-sprayed UC Davis students awarded $1 mln

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Published: 26 September, 2012, 21:23



College students and alumni that were injured when a police officer at the University of California, Davis, discharged military-grade pepper-spray in their face during a peaceful protest last year will split a settlement of roughly $1,000,000.
Pepper-sprayed UC Davis students awarded $1 mln


Members of the UC Regents board agreed earlier this month on a settlement to be split among the 21 demonstrators targeted by a campus cop since removed from the force, but the final amount was not disclosed until now. The Sacramento Bee reports on Wednesday that the board had decided behind closed doors on a figure of roughly $1 million.
"We did an injustice to our students that day at Davis, and some amount of recompense is appropriate," UC Davis student regent Jonathan Stein told the Los Angeles Times after their meeting earlier this month. "More importantly, it's time for us as an institution to publicly acknowledge that's not the way we should treat our students; we were wrong, and we are moving forward."
The terms of the settlement were unsealed in federal court Wednesday morning and, assuming the appropriate papers are authorized by a federal judge, each of the 21 plaintiffs in the case are expected to receive $30,000, totaling $630,000 in all. Additional plaintiffs are invited to come forward and file claims in order to collect from a pool of $100,000 set aside for a class action suit, and $250,000 will be handed to the attorneys who handled the case.
Lt. John Pike, the officer who injured the protesters during a peaceful demonstration that was caught on tape and took the Internet by storm, was placed on paid administrative leave for several months after the November 18, 2011 sit-in on the Davis campus. Student and alumni had gathered at the school to protest rising tuition fees.

The internal affairs investigation alone into Lt. Pike's actions cost the university $230,256.73, the Bee reports.
http://rt.com/usa/news/injured-uc-davis-settlement-048/

[Peter Lemkin]

The Plot Against Occupy
How the government turned five stoner misfits into the world's most hapless terrorist cell

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
September 26, 2012 1:00 PM ET
Illustration by John Ritter / Photo in Illustration by David Maxwell/EPA/Landov

Thunder rumbled and rain pattered on the leaves as Connor Stevens tramped through the darkness down a wooded path to the base of the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge. A sad-eyed 20-year-old poet from the Cleveland suburbs, Stevens was crouched in the foliage, his baby face obscured by a bushy lumberjack's beard. Beside him ducked two friends from Occupy Cleveland the group that had come to define Stevens and his place in the world both as gaunt and grungy as Stevens himself. Farther up the trail, Stevens knew, three other comrades were acting as lookouts. Gingerly, the young men opened the two black toolboxes they'd carried down from their van. Inside were eight pounds of C4 explosives.

They were actually going through with it. The six of them were going to blow up a bridge.

That they were on the brink of something so epic was surprising, even to the crew, a hodgepodge of drifters plus a pair of middle-class seekers: quiet Stevens and puppyishly excitable Brandon Baxter, also 20. Anarchists who had grown disenchanted with the Occupy movement, which they considered too conservative, they yearned to make a radical statement of their own to send a message to corporate America, its corrupt government and that invisible grid underlying it all, the System. They'd joined Occupy Cleveland in the fall, but over the winter they'd waited in vain for the group to pick a direction before finally taking matters into their own hands. For weeks they'd fantasized about the mayhem they'd wreak, puerile talk of stink bombs and spray paint that had anted up to discussion of all the shit they'd blow up if only they could. But the grandiosity of their hopes stood in stark contrast to their mundane routine. They spent their days getting stoned at their Occupy*subsidized commune in a downtown warehouse, squabbling over dish duty and barely making their shifts at the Occupy Cleveland info tent; when they managed to scrounge up a couple of cans of Spaghettios for dinner, it was celebrated as an accomplishment. If not for the help of their levelheaded comrade Shaquille Azir, who at this critical moment stood as lookout, hissing, "How much longer is this gonna take?" the plot might never have come together.

Inside Occupy Wall Street

The boys anxiously fiddled with the safety switch on one of the IEDs. Even on this April night, as they planted two bombs, the plan felt slapdash. No one knew how to handle the explosives. They had no getaway plan. At one point they'd discussed closing the bridge with traffic cones to minimize casualties 13,000 vehicles crossed the bridge daily but there was no mention of that now. Some of the accomplices weren't even clear on the evening's basic agenda. "Do we plant tonight and go boom tomorrow?" Baxter had asked in the van. "No, we're going to detonate these tonight," someone had clarified.

The red light on the other IED winked on, signaling it was armed. "One is good to go," Stevens announced. "We just gotta do this one." A night-vision camera mounted nearby captured the boys' movements as they hunched around the second IED until its light shone. Then all six jogged back to the van, relief in their voices. "We just committed the biggest act of terrorism that I know of since the 1960s," Stevens said, as a recording device memorialized every word. All that was left now was for the boys to pick a location from which to push the detonators and go boom. They were feeling pretty good. They decided to go to Applebee's.

Nothing was destined to blow up that night, as it turns out, because the entire plot was actually an elaborate federal sting operation. The case against the Cleveland Five, in fact, exposes not just a deeply misguided element of the Occupy movement, but also a shadowy side of the federal government. It's hardly surprising that the FBI decided to infiltrate Occupy; given the movement's challenge of the status quo and its hectic patchwork of factions including ones touting subversive agendas the feds worried it could become a terrorist breeding ground. Since 9/11, the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force has been charged with preventing further terrorist attacks. But anticipating and disrupting terrorist plots require both aggressive investigative techniques and a staggering level of collaboration and resources; to pull together the Cleveland case alone, the FBI coordinated with 23 different agencies. The hope, of course, is that the results make it all worthwhile: The plot is detected and heroically foiled, the evildoers arrested, and the American public sleeps easier. The problem is that in many cases, the government has determined that the best way to capture terrorists is simply to invent them in the first place.

"The government has a responsibility to prevent harm," says former FBI counterterrorism agent Michael German, now the senior policy counsel for the ACLU. "What they're doing instead is manufacturing threatening events."

That's just how it went down in Cleveland, where the defendants started out as disoriented young men wrestling with alienation, identity issues and your typical bucket of adolescent angst. They were malleable, ripe for some outside influence to coax them onto a new path. That catalyst could have come in the form of a friend, a family member or a cause. Instead, the government sent an informant.

And not just any informant, but a smooth-talking ex-con an incorrigible lawbreaker who racked up even more criminal charges while on the federal payroll. From the start, the government snitch nurtured the boys' destructive daydreams, egging them on every step of the way, giving them the encouragement and tools to turn their Fight Club-tinged tough talk into reality. To follow the evolution of the bombing plot under the informant's tutelage is to watch five young men get a giant federal-assisted upgrade from rebellious idealists to terrorist boogeymen. This process looks a lot like what used to be called entrapment. And yet

[URL="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-plot-against-occupy-20120926"]For parts 2, 3, 4 and 5....go here.
[/URL]

[Peter Lemkin]

Oakland police still handling fallout over treatment of Occupy movement
By Mary Slosson | Reuters Fri, Oct 12, 2012

(Reuters) - One year after anti-Wall Street protests began rocking the streets of Oakland, police said on Friday they had fired or suspended 17 officers after the demonstrations led to a record number of complaints against the department.

The Oakland Police Department came under intense scrutiny for its handling of the Occupy Oakland protests, with a federal judge in May calling for officials to deal with the backlog of complaints over police abuse or face sanctions.

Oakland police received 1,127 complaints, most of them stemming from three massive confrontations between police and protesters over the course of the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to a report by the department's Internal Affairs Division.

In a given year, the department receives a total of roughly 1,000 use-of-force complaints, said City of Oakland spokeswoman Karen Boyd.

Roughly a third of the use-of-force complaints occurred at a demonstration where a former Marine and Iraq war veteran, Scott Olsen, was critically injured after an Oakland police SWAT team member fired a beanbag round that hit him in the head, according to an independent report on the incident.

Protesters have said Olsen was hit by a tear gas canister fired by police.

Forty officers have been disciplined by the department so far, with two officers fired, 15 suspended and others receiving a mix of written reprimands, more training and one demotion.

"We are managing a delicate balance between protecting the first amendment rights of protesters, and protecting life and property when small groups of protesters engage in vandalism and violence," Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said in a written statement.

An independent review of the events published in June complimented Jordan for making improvements to the problem-riddled police department his highest priority.

Oakland police officials announced in April that the department was making significant changes to how it trains officers to control large crowds following criticism of its handling of the Occupy protests.

[Peter Lemkin]

NYPD RAMPS UP HEAT ON PROTESTERS: Sinking to New Lows in the Process
October 13, 2012 at 11:12:08
By Cory Clark

opednews.com

Police throw out OWS information fliers into the street. by Cory V. Clark

New York, New York October 11, 2012- NYPD is turning up the heat on protesters with increased violence, arrests and legalized theft of personal property.

"The intensity of harassment fluctuates from day to day depending on the white shirt in command that day," said Damien Shark, 42.

At 6PM NYPD moved in to clear protesters from in front of Trinity Church in order for the church to clean the city sidewalks they claim to be responsible for.

During the effort to remove protesters, Officer Price of the 7th precinct violently shoved past a Red Cross medic to remove a tarp in which information about Occupy Wall Street was laid out. Officer price then threw the paper materials, tarp and storage devices into the street temporarily obstructing traffic.

Earlier in the evening three protesters in Harlem were arrested at a community supported occupation they had started several days before. NYPD refuses to comment on the arrests claiming it was for disorderly conduct.

At 9 PM police enter the encampment in front of Trinity attempting to grab personal property from protesters, claim that it was abandoned even while the owner was sitting next to the item, abusing the term reasonable in order to justify the theft of property. Including the attempt to grab several thousand dollars worth of art from Philadelphia Mixed Media Artist Danielle Finger, who has several galleries and national art shows under her belt, including a recent show for the National Adoption Center where a piece she painted sold for as much as a Zoe Strauss.

This is the second artist to be targeted by NYPD at Trinity, just three weeks ago a young woman of color named Sparrow was knocked unconscious by an NYPD sergeant then arrested in the hospital while trying to protect a painting of hers that had been illegally taken and thrown in a trash truck for disposal.

Just two hours later Police reentered the encampment to make a second attempt at grabbing personal property. Police confiscated the walker of a disabled protester and threw it in the trash. Other protesters retrieved the walker condemning police for targeting a disabled person.

After a twenty minute show down over the information tarp and whether it was considered permanent or semipermanent, some discussion with the lieutenant on scene, police threw food donated to the protesters into the street again obstructing traffic temporarily.

Once the police returned to the other side of the street a protester known as revolution threw a slice of pizza that he had picked up from the street and threw it at a police cruiser. Protesters ushered him away before police could cross the street to make the arrest.

The protester who threw the pizza later returned to the encampment in the early morning hours, police apparently decided not to pursue the issue.

"NYPD threw out crates of food out in the street endangering the lives of drivers and Occupiers, so I thought if they can do it why can't I,there shouldn't be two standards of behavior, one for us and another for NYPD, " said Revolution who is from Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Police returned just a few hours before dawn for a forth engagement with protesters. Finding many of the protesters prepared for the harassment police chose to direct their attack whole heartedly against the disabled.

Confiscating without providing a confiscation receipt for a second time the walker of one disabled person and ordering another disabled transsexual person to sleep in her wheel.

"A white shirt told me that I have to sit in my chair or he would take it," said Aqua Star-Nyght, 26 from Brooklyn. "I wasn't allowed to sleep laying down like other protesters, I felt like I was singled out because I'm trans, and disabled no other reason."

She remained defiant and the lieutenant eventually backed off.

Police are not permitted to confiscate personal property without reasonable proof of abandonment, according to numerous federal court cases, including Lavan Vs. The City of Las Angeles. Where it was the opinion of the court that the confiscation of property by police without such proof was a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

"In this case the purpose of such confiscations is that of harassing persons exercising their First Amendment Rights as well and there fore is a violation of the First Amendment as well," Said Danielle Finger, 23.

A little after dawn police came in to awaken protesters still asleep in order for the private maintenance company that cleans the sidewalks for Trinity Church to wet down the sidewalk with a garden hose.

Moments after they moved in to kick protesters awake they arrested Aaron Williams, 20 years old from Syracuse, New York apparently for blowing a hand held air horn. He was not informed what he was being charged with and NYPD refuse to give information on what precinct he was being taken to.

" It seems that the goal of NYPD is to break protesters, we need to pace ourselves to endure, they know we wont be moved, so we just have to surf the waves they throw at us," said Fathema Shadidi, 57 a Red Cross Crisis Intervention Medic.

Many of the protesters show signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, often snapping at each other, clearly in a state of constant terror. Often Protesters will jump at the sight of an NYPD officer, or become very aggressive in their presence.

"People tend to take their stress out on themselves, they internalize the abuse," said Shididi. " In the short term you will see a lot of bouts sleep deprivation and exhaustion, in the long term numbness and ultimately PTSD and severe depression."

"This is crazy people shouldn't have to endure this sort of harassment for exercising their First Amendment rights, this is the kind of sh*t we condemn countries like Syria and China for, are we the pot calling the kettle black here or what," said Chino Futuristic, 25 from El Paso, Texas.

[Peter Lemkin]

Why I'm Voting Green
By Chris Hedges
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/29/2012 at 09:44:19

The November election is not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It is not a battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It is a battle between the corporate state and us. And if we do not immediately engage in this battle we are finished, as climate scientists have made clear. I will defy corporate power in small and large ways. I will invest my energy now solely in acts of resistance, in civil disobedience and in defiance.

Those who rebel are our only hope. And for this reason I will vote next month for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, although I could as easily vote for Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. I will step outside the system. Voting for the "lesser evil" -- or failing to vote at all -- is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.

All the major correctives to American democracy have come through movements and third parties that have operated outside the mainstream. Few achieved formal positions of power. These movements built enough momentum and popular support, always in the face of fierce opposition, to force the power elite to respond to their concerns. Such developments, along with the courage to defy the political charade in the voting booth, offer the only hope of saving us from Wall Street predators, the assault on the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the rise of the security and surveillance state and the dramatic erosion of our civil liberties.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any," Alice Walker writes.

It was the Liberty Party that first fought slavery. It was the Prohibition and Socialist parties, along with the Suffragists, that began the fight for the vote for women and made possible the 19th Amendment. It was the Socialist Party, along with radical labor unions, that first battled against child labor and made possible the 40-hour workweek. It was the organizing of the Populist Party that gave us the Immigration Act of 1924 along with a "progressive" tax system. And it was the Socialists who battled for unemployment benefits, leading the way to the Social Security Act of 1935. No one in the ruling elite, including Franklin Roosevelt, would have passed this legislation without pressure from the outside.

"It is the combination of a social movement on the ground with an independent political party that has always made history together, whether during abolition, women's suffrage or the labor movement," Stein said when I reached her by phone as she campaigned in Chicago...

"We need courage in our politics that matches the courage of the social movements -- of Occupy, eviction blockades, Keystone pipeline civil disobedience, student strikes, the Chicago teachers union and more. If public opinion really mattered in this race, we [her presidential ticket] would win. We have majority support in poll after poll on nearly all of the key issues, from downsizing the military budget and bringing the troops home, to taxing the rich, to stopping the Wall Street bailouts, to breaking up the banks, to ending the offshoring of jobs, to supporting workers' rights, to increasing the minimum wage, to health care as a human right, through Medicare for all. These are the solutions a majority of Americans are clamoring for."

The corporate state has successfully waged a campaign of fear to disempower voters and citizens. By intimidating voters through a barrage of propaganda with the message that Americans have to vote for the lesser evil and that making a defiant stand for justice and democracy is counterproductive, it cements into place the agenda of corporate domination we seek to thwart. This fear campaign, skillfully disseminated by the $2.5 billion spent on political propaganda, has silenced real political opposition. It has turned those few politicians and leaders who have the courage to resist, such as Stein and Ralph Nader, into pariahs, denied a voice in the debates and the national discourse. Capitulation, silence and fear, however, are not a strategy. They will guarantee everything we seek to avoid.

"The Obama administration has embraced the policies of George W. Bush, and then gone much further," Stein said...

"Wall Street bailouts went ballistic under Obama -- $700 billion under Bush, but $4.5 trillion under Obama, plus another $16 trillion in zero-interest loans for Wall Street. Obama continues offshoring our jobs. Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA, which was carried out under George W. Bush. It was vastly expanded under Obama to labor abusers in Colombia, and to Panama and South Korea. The Transpacific Partnership, being negotiated behind closed doors by the Obama White House, is NAFTA on steroids. It continues to send our jobs overseas. It undermines wages at home. It overrides American sovereignty by establishing an international corporate board that can overrule American legislation and regulations that protect workers as well as our air, our water, our climate and our food supply."

Obama, who has claimed the power of assassinating U.S. citizens without charge or trial, increased the drone war and has vastly expanded the wars in the Middle East. He is waging proxy wars in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. His assault on civil liberties -- from his use of the Espionage Act to silence whistle-blowers to Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act to the FISA Amendment Act -- is worse than Bush's. His attack on immigrant rights has also outpaced that of Bush. Obama has deported more undocumented workers in four years than his Republican predecessor did in eight years. There is negligible difference between Obama and Romney on the issue of student debt, which has turned a generation of college students into indentured servants. But the most important convergence between the Republicans and the Democrats is their utter failure to address the perilous assault by the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. It was Obama who undercut the international climate accord reached last year at Durban, South Africa, saying the world could wait until 2020 for an agreement.

"Obama is promoting oil drilling in the Arctic, where the ice cap has already collapsed to one-quarter of its size from a couple decades ago, and he's opened up our national parks for drilling," Stein said.

"He has given the green light to fracking. He has permitted the exhaust from shale oil [extraction] to go into the atmosphere. He is building the southern pass of the Keystone pipeline. He brags that he has built more miles of pipeline than any other president.

"There is a protracted drought in 60 percent of the continental U.S. There are record forest fires and rising food prices. We have just now seen the 12 hottest months on record. Storms are growing in destructiveness. All this is happening with less than 1-degree Celsius temperature rise. Yet we are now on track for a 6-degree Celsius warming in this century alone. This is not survivable. The most pessimistic science on climate change has underpredicted the rate at which climate change is advancing."

The flimsy excuses used by liberals and progressives to support Obama, including the argument that we can't let Romney appoint the next Supreme Court justices, ignore the imperative of building a movement as fast and as radical as possible as a counterweight to corporate power. The Supreme Court, no matter what its composition, will not save us from financial implosion and climate collapse. And Obama, whatever his proclivity on social issues, has provided ample evidence that he will not alter his servitude to the corporate state. For example, he has refused to provide assurance that he will not make cuts in basic social infrastructures. He has proposed raising the eligibility age for Medicare, a move that would leave millions without adequate health care in retirement. He has said he will reduce the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, thrusting vast numbers of seniors into poverty. Progressives' call to vote for independents in "safe" states where it is certain the Democrats will win will do nothing to mitigate fossil fuel's ravaging of the ecosystem, regulate and prosecute Wall Street or return to us our civil liberties.

"There is no state out there where either Obama or Romney offers a way out of here alive," Stein said. "It's up to us to create truly safe states, a safe nation, and a safe planet. Neither Obama nor Romney has a single exit strategy from the deadly crises we face."

[Magda Hassan]

Bank of England official: Occupy Movement right about global recession

Andrew Haldane said protestors were correct to focus on inequality as the chief reason for 2008 economic crash

• Phillip Inman, economics correspondent
  
• The Guardian, Monday 29 October 2012 21.06 GMT
  

The Occupy Movement has found an unlikely ally in a senior Bank of England official, Andrew Haldane, who has praised protesters for their role in triggering an overhaul of the financial services sector.
Haldane, who oversees the City for the central bank, said Occupy acted as a lever on policymakers despite criticism that its aims were too vague. He said the protest movement was right to focus on inequality as the chief reason for the 2008 crash, following studies that showed the accumulation of huge wealth funded by debt was directly responsible for the domino-like collapse of the banking sector in 2008.
Speaking at a debate held by the Occupy Movement in central London, Haldane said regulations limiting credit use would undermine attempts by individuals to accumulate huge property and financial wealth at the expense of other members of society. Allowing banks to lend on a massive scale also drained funding from other industries, adding to the negative impact that unregulated banks had on the economy, he said.
The hard-hitting speech is unlikely to find a warm welcome in the Square Mile, which is keen for bank lending to recover to its heady pre-crisis levels and bring accompanying profits and commissions. Lending to individuals and corporations in the UK has fallen to a fraction of the levels seen in 2007 when few banks checked the income status of individual borrowers or the risks being taken by corporate customers before offering a loan. The Bank of England will impose stricter lending rules on banks next year when it takes over regulation of the industry from the Financial Services Authority.
Haldane said Occupy's voice had been "loud and persuasive" and that "policymakers have listened and are acting in ways which will close those fault-lines" with a "reformation of finance that Occupy has helped stir". He said inequality was fuelled by bank lending for speculation on property and other assets that enriched some in society at the expense of others.
"The asset-rich, in particular the owner-occupying rich, became a lot richer. Meanwhile, the asset-less and indebted fell further behind. In other words, the pre-crisis asset price bubble acted like a regressive tax," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct...y-movement

[Peter Lemkin]

3 Occupy Wall Street Protesters Win $50K Settlement Over "Thought Crime" Arrest

The city has settled a lawsuit brought by three Occupy Wall Street protestors who accused the NYPD of arresting them without cause, detaining them for almost 24 hours, and forcing them through a humiliating strip search. On November 17th 2011, 20-year-old Kira Moyer-Sims was buying coffee on the Lower East Side while three friends waited in a nearby car. Suddenly 30 police officers swooped in and arrested them, and later drilled them on their relationship with the movement while they were in custody. "I felt like I had been arrested for a thought crime," Moyer-Sims said at the time. Taxpayers will now give her $15,000 to make up for it.
According to the settlement, the city will pay $50,000 total to Moyer-Sims, Angela Richino, and Matthew Vrvilo. (It's unclear what happened to the fourth person arrested.) All the plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit had been charged with obstructing governmental administrationcharges that were later dropped by the DA's office.
"They were arrested on the belief that they were about to go to a protest," their attorney Vijayant Pawar tells us. "But they were not going to a protest. So either the NYPD was following them for quite some time or the NYPD just thought they looked like protestors. But they were far away from the protest when they were picked up by the NYPD Intelligence Division and arrested and held for 24 hours."
Pawar says his clients are satisfied with the settlement, but that it doesn't make up for the NYPD's actions. Asked to confirm that they were in fact Occupy Wall Street protesters, Pawar argued that such classifications missed the point. "Were they with OWS?" Pawar asked. "I don't know that you can paint someone with that brush. They had not been arrested before and have not been arrested since then. They were not going to protest that day. Were they part of the OWS movement? It's hard to say who is."

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

Occupy Wall Street offshoot to buy and abolish millions of dollars of debt for the 99 percent

By Sam Byford on November 15, 2012 09:44 pm Email Email Larry @345triangle

Personal debt is a huge problem in the US, but some Occupy Wall Street alumni think they have a solution. Since it's possible for banks to sell debt for a fraction of its worth onto third parties who then attempt to collect the full amount, Occupy offshoot Strike Debt wants to become one of those buyers except it won't collect. After gathering donations, the Rolling Jubilee project will purchase debt from banks and wipe it off the record. The launch event is currently being streamed on its website.

At the time of writing the Rolling Jubilee had raised $243,127, which it claims gives enough buying power to cancel $4,867,367 of debt. The unprecedented scheme has a few logistical kinks; while it highlights the fact that 62 percent of bankruptcies are caused by poor health, for example, there's no way for it to know whose debt it's purchasing. It also won't be able to buy out student loans due to the lack of a secondary market. Still, it could be a compelling project for anyone who wants to make their charitable donations worth 20 times as much.


Just to update...they have now raised [as of 11/17/12] $309,548 - enough to abolish $6,195,781 of debt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To donate Link.

[Magda Hassan]

Occupy Wall Street offshoot to buy and abolish millions of dollars of debt for the 99 percent

By Sam Byford on November 15, 2012 09:44 pm Email Email Larry @345triangle

Personal debt is a huge problem in the US, but some Occupy Wall Street alumni think they have a solution. Since it's possible for banks to sell debt for a fraction of its worth onto third parties who then attempt to collect the full amount, Occupy offshoot Strike Debt wants to become one of those buyers except it won't collect. After gathering donations, the Rolling Jubilee project will purchase debt from banks and wipe it off the record. The launch event is currently being streamed on its website.

At the time of writing the Rolling Jubilee had raised $243,127, which it claims gives enough buying power to cancel $4,867,367 of debt. The unprecedented scheme has a few logistical kinks; while it highlights the fact that 62 percent of bankruptcies are caused by poor health, for example, there's no way for it to know whose debt it's purchasing. It also won't be able to buy out student loans due to the lack of a secondary market. Still, it could be a compelling project for anyone who wants to make their charitable donations worth 20 times as much.


Just to update...they have now raised [as of 11/17/12] $309,548 - enough to abolish $6,195,781 of debt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To donate Link.

Brilliant!