Denial, anger, and bargaining¹over the loss of Our Beloved OccuSink to the urge to march. @arieloshin met up with the carpenters and continued on to the #99unity rally in Copley Square.

There is a broad range of social justice issues on the agenda for today, including the mother of all social justice issues – abrupt global climate change/climate justice.

¹No one is in acceptance. We are confident that the court will realize that it was an unreasonable seizure.

Occupy Boston goes to court tomorrow. A Temporary Restraining Order prevents the Boston Police from removing the tents from Dewey Square Park. Superior Court Judge Francis Mcintyre ruled that tents constitute symbolic free speech. The hearing will determine if the TRO will be replaced by a Preliminary Injunction or simply expire leaving the BPD to do their will. The National Lawyers Guild lawyer representing us is optimistic. Another member of the Guild told me, “the case will be over.”  Folks went out tonight to rally public support. @gvmiii tweeted using a photohost with a less than obvious “intellectual property” regime.

You Can’t Evict an Idea

This is what alternative media looks like.

A number of folks from Occupy Boston went down to Plymouth to join with the Native American community in their Day of Mourning. I didn’t go with them. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to sleep late.  Rather,  I felt my place was at Harvard¹

Selamat datang, Sat sri akaal

Flickr tells me that this how to greet people in Malaysian and Punjabi respectively.  The thumbnail pictures are links to  larger images hosted on Flickr.

The world holds enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.

Folks at Occupy Boston gave Ghandi a floral wreath for the Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning holiday. The ranks of Occupy Harvard were swelled by the arrival of Romance Language faculty, family, and friends.

A small sample of Romance Language faculty. They were quite good at mingling. I’m glad to see Harvard hasn’t squashed the romance out of their spirits. The spread on Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning brought by occupiers and supporters. There was more than one flavor of occu-pie.

 My apology to Dr. Allen Counter and family. They showed up with a heap of provisions. When Dr. Allen said smoked turkey, I kind of forgot to take pictures. It was greatly appreciated throughout the day and into the next day.  We clearly heard him say it was from the administration. Some folks thought they had heard the President mentioned. I think we should assume the best and thank her. As John Miller, CEO of Intermetrics, Inc.² pointed out, “Thank you’s are cheap.”

¹At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
²Intermetrics was a spinoff of the MIT Instrumentation Lab which specialized in missle guidance. I*2’s claim to fame was that they wrote the compiler for the Space Shuttle. I*2 is no longer in business. The Instrumentation Lab is now known as the Draper Lab.

There are two parties urging you to do this.

Jerry Stiller

One of the parties is Jerry Stiller:

Jerry Stiller in New York City for a book reading for Festivus.
[Photo: Daniel Krieger via Wikimedia Foundation]

I could not navigate the copyright quagmire well enough to show you the actual ad.  But Jerry is a paid spokesman for the 1%.

Capital None

We, the 99%, urge you to move your money  out of any for-profit  bank and deposit it in a not-for-profit credit union.  It is not a radical idea, but is does fall within the scope of direct action broadly understood. I heard it proposed by two time gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross¹.  There was one earlier attempt by Occupy_Boston.²  I was told that the banks simply refused to give them their money.  The current effort appears to be nationwide. Like many things associated with Occupy .*³, leadership is “dynamic and evolving.”  The Facebook incarnation lists Kristen Christian from LA as originator and it is called Bank Transfer Day.  Occupy Boston lists  Move Your Money.

The Move Your Money Project describes itself on the bottom of it’s home page as  Another Stadia Studio Project. It appears to be a for-profit venture from St. Louis MO. I’ll reserve judgement about whether that is a problem for what I hope will qualify as an anti-capitalist movement. Occupy Wall Street was started by Adbusters Magazine. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal  took that to be proof that we are at heart a capitalist movement. Wikipedia paints a picture of Kalle Lasn at the very least opposed to corporatocracy. And my new friend Liam tells me that Lasn is “the real deal.”

The project has produced a video which has very high productions values.  Footage from “It’s a Wonderful Life” is intercut with footage from CNN and CSPAN from 2008.  It is well done, but I’m concerned that folks will buy into the idea that banks are the only way to aggregate capital but had strayed just a bit in Frank Capra’s time. By 1946, the New Deal and/or World War II had mitigated the worst of the Depression. But in the early days of the Depression a lot of folks were more with Woody Guthrie in The Ballad of Pretty Boy  Floyd:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

Despite it’s fairly moderate approach, I do think Move Your Money Day is worth doing for those that have some⁴. It is a way to support Occupy .* It is not radical, but it may help. And perhaps it will inspire more dramatic efforts.

We, at Dewey Square and others sites around the nation and around the world would not still be in place were it not for the outpouring of community support. Thank you. I hope, fairly soon, to discuss what I have learned about Consensus, Contradiction, and Community.

To add some energy to this movement, some friends from Occupy Boston will leave Dewey Square on a tour of the Financial District Saturday morning Nov. 5 at 10:30 AM.

I will be at Harvard guarding the library.

¹Grace ran once on the Green-Rainbow Party ticket. It was the Massachusetts branch of the national Green Party. Green-Rainbow still exists, but is has been demoted to a ‘political designation’ due to low vote count. She ran again as a Democrat.  She gave an excellent talk at Community Church of Boston.

²If you want to appear hipper than you really are, you can follow @Occupy_Boston on Twitter.

³I have used the language of regular expressions in the title of a previous post. I repeat the explanation. Regular expressions are a part of the Chomsky Hierarchy – Class 3 according to Wikipedia. I had used them for thirty years. In all that time, I never heard Chomsky’s name connected with them even though I heard his name at anti-war rallies all the time. The dot is the symbol for any single character in the alphabet of the language. The asterisk indicates “zero or more occurences”. Combined, they match any number of anythings i.e. all possible sentences of the language. Occupy is growing.

⁴I’m not penniless, but close to it thanks to the recalcitrance of Mr. Leo Godwin of the Quincy office of the United States of Blackwater Revenue Service. Even without Leo, Harvard’s campaign to reduce the standard of living of it’s low wage workers would have me homeless as I am. But what money I do have is in the Harvard University Employees Credit Union.

Democracy Now has Pamela Galpern, a striking Verizon worker and union activist who says,

“Verizon [has] launched a full-scale attack. Essentially, the company has said despite the fact we’re hugely profitable, we’re going to take advantage of the economic situation in the country right now to try to roll back the wages, benefits, and job security of our workers.”

Meanwhile, here in Boston

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2222 and the Communications Workers of America Local 1400 were at the Verizon office in Post Office Square. They were there last night”:

Through the wee hours:

And into today:

Solid sisters.

The Brotherhood [IBEW] his sisters in its ranks:

as do the Communication Workers of America. There is support from Unite-HERE!:

the Boston firefighters:

and Harvard Labor: