Peace Vigil Paintings

Iran or New York’s Natural Gas, 2012: War or Fracking; what’s the difference? Same Empire Squid.

tomthumbsgallery — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:29:42 +0000

Empires never worry about civilian deaths in their own population (see Stalin’s starvation of the Ukraine). Empires never wonder whether they are overconfident until way after they are defeated at some “Waterloo” event. Empire leaders think that there is always some deeper and farther away bunker in which they are finally safe from all of the destruction and killing they have inflicted upon other countries and upon their own (see Bush, Romney & Texan dynasties). If you think your life matters to these folks, read about all of the people they killed just in South America to prop up dictators friendly to the corporates. The America-Fuck-Yeah, “blow shit up that gets in the way”, culture; which has dominated other peoples for a century, is now come home to prey on its own people. And that is just “the war to keep their power” part of empire. Now they’ve come for us, our water, air and soil through poisonous drilling for natural gas.

As a more pin-pointed target, hydrofracking gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale is a direct attack on the clean water, clean air, and clean farming soil in Southwestern New York State, and a direct attack on the people who live here. It is an indirect attack on all of those people in metropolitan areas such as NYC and Syracuse, because clean water travels from the areas to be fracked to the metropolitan areas. The international corporations which have invested in strip-mining New York State for natural gas range from Chinese petroleum/energy giants who have bought stock in leases to India’s Reliant Energy corporation. Norway’s StatOil has bought leases too. The corporate empire whose octopus head is on Wall Street extends to every developed countries’ economic mainframe. That is why it is called Empire, because that is what it is, with tentacles extending to the exploitative hotspots of every country’s economy.

The Corporate Empire’s, 1 through 4, Fukishima, Japan, ”melted-down” power reactors are still spewing radioactive wastes into the Pacific while the censorship of the Empire Media on this topic is damn near complete. I raise the issue of these cancer creating radioactive wastes spilling in a “silenced” ongoing tragedy, because I know that the corporate media refuses to address the cancers caused by pollution from hydrofracking for gas. How much more so has there been silence on Dimock, Pennsylvania’s blow-out and water wells pollution. The EPA’s Pavillon, Wyoming study which proves that these fracked wells result in contamination of water wells and well-connected, acquifers, should have gotten headlines, but instead got the silence of “tons of silence” which have cursed the people of Fukishima, Japan.

Shale is laid down in layers and cracks in vertical and horizontal arrays. Any first year geology student knows this to be true. Just as ground water will slowly seep through this array of cracks into deeper zones called acquifers, so highly pressurized natural gas, toxic fracking fluids like benzene, will slowly find their way back up and through the same cracks into the acquifer and into wells. It is the difference in pressure that causes the migration to be inevitable: from high pressure zones to low pressure zones, it is a law of physics. No manmade system such as a casing or a container for wastes, is perfect; and redundant systems afford a margin of error for mistakes (like the diesel generators at Fukishima) But in unforeseen circumstances like earthquakes and tsunamis, the redundant systems fail. And with age, all systems fail, especially in pipe casings you cannot see, thousands of feet below the ground level. And the corruption of fail-safe devices as in the BP oil spill, where the safety valve device subcontractor denies the blame for the failure, are the norm, not the oddball outcome. But Empire refuses to be moved by science, historical evidence and facts.

It won’t matter if Empire’s war on Iran does not cause the nuclear-armed, friends of Iran to destroy the USA; if the Empire’s pollution of the NY Marcellus Shale and the clean waters of the State of New York goes forward as planned. The same environmental catastrophe will be achieved. One of the exploitable countries will be forced to yield its resources to the giant octopus of Empire. Though it be through fracking and not through war, or by war for oil in Iran and not through fracking in New York, Empire will fill its pockets with profits, either way. The falsehood or illusion of our rights to our own land and natural resources as citizens is made clear by the Rights of Corporations to destroy us, our lands, and the lives and lands of people in far off Iran.

Drones: Baby Killers Incorporated.

tomthumbsgallery — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:00:38 +0000

The idea behind drone warfare was to reduce modern armies’ troop casualties. Troop casualties in the minds of war makers are the weak political pivot points upon which their rationales for war making utterly collapse. Media censorship obviates civilian deaths and censors the destruction of entire countries and their infrastructures. But when US troops die, the wars lose their attractiveness at home. So unmanned aerial combat planes remove the political problem of the real cost of war to empire-nation troops.

The downside of using drones in wars is the desensitization to killing in wars at home in the war making empire countries, such as the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. Censored wars without a human cost do not have all of the cathectic pull of a good TV drama, and actually much less of an emotional impact. For example…….

Drones make war making more likely. When a U-2 pilot was captured by Russia in the Cold War, it was a big deal for the U.S. to get that human being back. When a drone was captured by Iran last month, it was a story in the newspapers for two days, then nothing more. Hence, “send in the drones” is a decision to spend money and destroy other countries’ lives, not our own. Drones make war easy.

Drone warfare

There are many people who have written about drones and this source cited below is a good general summary of drone information and history.

Drone information here: (updated constantly by a UK author)

http://dronewarsuk.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/drone-wars-briefing-jan2012.pdf

Update:

Huge Protest in Pakistan Against U.S. Drone Attacks:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/01/28-1

John Tirman’s Essential Thoughts on Civilian Deaths in America’s Wars.

tomthumbsgallery — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:55:50 +0000

John Tirman, author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, has written an Editorial for the New York Times, published January 4th, 2012.

He has kindly given permission for it to be shown here:

The Forgotten Wages of War

By JOHN TIRMAN

Cambridge, Mass.

THE end of the Iraq war occasioned few reflections on the scale of destruction we have wrought there. As is our habit, the discussion focused on the costs to America in blood and treasure, the false premises of the war and the continuing challenges of instability in the region. What happened to Iraqis was largely ignored. And in Libya, the recent investigation of civilian casualties during NATO’s bombing campaign was the first such accounting of what many believed was a largely victimless war.

We rarely question that wars cause extensive damage, but our view of America’s wars has been blind to one specific aspect of destruction: the human toll of those who live in war zones.

We tune out the voices of the victims and belittle their complaints about the midnight raids, the house-to-house searches, the checkpoints, the drone attacks, the bombs that fall on weddings instead of Al Qaeda.

Gen. Tommy R. Franks famously said during the early days of the war in Afghanistan, “We don’t do body counts.” But someone should. What we learn from body counts tells us much about war and those who wage it.

More than 10 years after the war in Afghanistan began, we have only the sketchiest notion of how many people have died as a consequence of the conflict. The United Nations office in Kabul assembles some figures from morgues and other sources, but they are incomplete. The same has been true for Iraq, although a number of independent efforts have been made there to account for the dead.

But such numbers, which run into the hundreds of thousands, gain scant attention. American political and military leaders, like the public, show little interest in non-American casualties.

Denial, after all, is politically convenient. Failing to consider the mortality figures, the refugees, the impoverished, the demolished hospitals and clean water systems and schools is to deny, in effect, that the war ever happened.

The American military cannot afford to be so cavalier about the dynamics of war. The consequences of how we fight wars reveals a great deal about how and why others fight us.

In Iraq, for example, the causes of the Sunni resistance were often attributed to lost social status; the role of American violence against civilians early in the conflict was rarely discussed. Yet many of the captured Iraqis said they were defending their communities by resisting the occupying forces. Roughing up, detaining or killing suspected enemy fighters — as the coalition forces did in countless operations — prompted some Iraqis to take up the gun, the I.E.D. and the suicide bomb. The more violence from the occupiers, the more ferocious their reaction.

Gen. David H. Petraeus recognized this and sought to reform Army practice. In a field manual he co-authored in 2006, he explained that when “forces fail to provide security or threaten the security of civilians, the population is likely to seek security guarantees from insurgents, militias or other armed groups. This situation can feed support for an insurgency.”

In several opinion polls, Iraqis identified American forces as the primary cause of the violence besetting their country. And although the violence of war and occupation was a proximate cause of the Iraqi resistance, we have few metrics to understand its scope. WikiLeaks released military documents in October 2010 that included accounts of Iraqi fatalities, but such reports are incomplete and sometimes biased, and they reflect only what the troops actually witnessed. News media reports are similarly limited. And our political and military leaders barely consider these numbers anyway.

They dwell instead in a make-believe world of vastly less mayhem, oblivious to what actually besets the civilian population. In 2006, two separate household surveys, by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, found between 400,000 and 650,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq as a result of the war. At the time, however, the commanding general in Iraq put the number at 50,000 and President Bush had claimed in late 2005 that it was just 30,000.

If our leaders are unwilling to grasp the scale of death and social disruption, and the meaning of this chaos for the local population, then American war efforts are likely to end badly and relationships with allies will become strained, as has happened with President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai’s repeated complaints about NATO actions that cause civilian casualties are often dismissed in the West as political posturing, but his persistence on this issue indicates how deeply it resonates with Afghans. While we dismiss it, Muslims around the world take note.

Ignoring the extent of civilian casualties and the damage they cause is a moral failing as well as a strategic blunder. We need to adopt reliable ways to measure the destruction our wars cause — an “epistemology of war,” as another general, William Tecumseh Sherman, called it — to break through the collective amnesia that has gripped us.

If we do not demand a full accounting of the wages of war, future failures are all the more likely — and warranted.

John Tirman, the executive director of the Center for International Studies at M.I.T., is the author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.”

Blog person’s note: Tirman’s work is the inspiration for the sculpture, Civilian Deaths Memorial. Photos of that sculpture can be found here:

A Civilian War Deaths Memorial | Peace Vigil Paintings

The antidote to war is love.

tomthumbsgallery — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:58:46 +0000

Can you see what I see?

"Music is a river of love."

A family is also a river of love.

And beauty sometimes rides within the wind.

Beauty and love walk in brave voices calling for equality.

Even the humble pine cone has something to offer after giving up its seeds.

And is not true forgiveness also beautiful?

And friends whose eyes uplift us.

Suppression of Freedom of Speech and of a Free Press are the Building Blocks of a Police State

tomthumbsgallery — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:51:54 +0000

The Bradley Manning Freedom I.Q. Curve

Americans are staring into a future of police state zombie un-living.

Acts of civil disobedience in the form of encampments in public spaces have been responded to with police violence, media smearing as character assassination of the Occupy movement, and silence or ignoring by politicians who saw nothing they could exploit for their own empowerment in this new social movement. Nonprofit groups such as churches have sided with their own financial interests in their own extensive real estate ownings, rather than throw themselves into supporting this new movement for social justice.

New York Post Smears Occupy:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/time_to_throw_the_bums_out_sLMqzwIGFNZVxQRFashrUO

Media personnel, journalists, bloggers, live-stream videographers were thrown out of Liberty Park when police evicted the encampment on November 15th in the wee hours and darkness of the night. TV helicopters were prohibited from taping the eviction from overhead by order of the police or NYC mayor. In his confabulated defense of police state tactics, Mayor Bloomberg asserted that the media had been removed and arrested for their own safety and so that they would not interfere with the eviction. Representative Nadler requested an investigation of the treatment of both protestors and media claiming that what happened violated the Constitutional rights of both.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/news-organizations-complain-about-treatment-during-protests/

For my own ‘protection’ I created a fake PRESS PASS. This will permit me (in my imagination) to float in and out of civil disobedience situations, dutifully recording the voices and stories of protestors, police and other ‘credentialed’ media as they all are reduced to pawns by the corporate state.

Feel free to make a copy of my creation and to engage in this futile fantasy that as long as you are wearing this magic charm, you will not be gassed, beaten with a baton, hit in the head with a concussion grenade, kettled in funky orange snow fencing, and injured for life by the corporate industrial power complex which will not let its rules be defied nor have its injustices exposed. And have your camera taken and your computer destroyed along with any library of books you have in tow.

You can add a bright red string to hold this around your neck and head; not that the police will pay any attention to this while you are being thrown to the ground, yelled at and arrested. So wear a tie and a nice white shirt too. How about my State Department of Education License in my profession? Wear ‘em if ya got ‘em! How about the license plates to my car duct taped to my arms like football guards? Too threatening.

Clinton, Obama and other two-faced ones railed in feigned indignation when Egypt’s Mubarak tried to shut down Al Jazeera’s news media’s reporting on events in Tahir Square in Cairo. Their hypocrisy continues as they extoll freedom fighters in Myanmar and condemn them here. How can you say that Egyptians deserve their freedoms and their own bill of rights while denying Americans their rights contained within their own Bill of Rights which they already have?

The Occupy Movement has won. Occupy has shown that the moral, social and political structure of American society is completely duplicitous and empty. Only the husk of America remains, the consumerism and utilitarianism. Meantime, “Keep moving. Don’t block the traffic on the sidewalk.” This is now a ride at an amusement park instead of a democracy, “Tickets please!”

Occupy an alternative Press. Occupy your blogs. Write. Publish. Distribute. Educate. Learn. A parallel news network is a necessity. And fun is necessary too, hence my fake press pass.

This Is How Wars Start.

tomthumbsgallery — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:49:36 +0000

In 2007 I wrote An Open Letter To Families In Iran. I pleaded with the Iranians to respond peacefully to the cowboy in the White House (boy-man Bush). I pleaded with Americans to reconsider the nonsensical assertions that the Iranians were developing anything near a nuclear threat to Americans, much less to Israelis.

In 2007 a comprehensive, multi-agency intelligence report on Iran stated that Iran had ceased any scientific exploration of developing a nuclear bomb when America started its war against Afghanistan and the Middle East. The anti Iran propaganda writers shifted to a focus on Iran’s ‘uncooperativeness’. A new IAEA director began a new biased approach of villifying Iran, with encouragement from war mongers in Washington, D.C.. In 2008, Wall Street crashed requiring a pause in the action while the bookies stopped to refill their chip holders with public cash.

For years since 2007, David Sanger and the New York Times have been showering the American public with propaganda, alleging that uncertainties of the IAEA constituted a ‘nuclear threat’ from Iran. After Obama became President, we watched as a new President capitulated to neo-con war mongering toward Iran and back room legislating against the Iranian people through economic sanctions. Israeli press have consistently repeated not so covert threats of an Israeli attack on Iran. Now the Obama capitulation and sanctions have begun and Iran is retaliating by threatening to shut down the Straits of Hormuz and thereby to close the spigot on Middle East oil.

To Iran I would say the same thing I would warn President Obama: You are only hurting the low-income, the poor, the unemployed, the retired, the sick and the weak, marginalized parts of society. These poor and near poor cannot afford artificially inflated high food, gas and heating oil prices. This message applies to both countries’ leaders. The only group which will benefit from any disruption in the flow of oil will be the banks and the oil companies and those who benefit from speculating on oil and the price of food, profit taking from commodity speculations, and those that sell and buy insurance against price spikes. In other words, Wall Street and stock exchanges across the world.

To Wall Street I would say, “You have overplayed your hand and you have been caught with your hand in the cookie jar, over and over again.” To those politicians who have already cut LIHEAP assistance to help people pay for heating their houses, I would say, “People who are freezing in their homes will hold you responsible. How much more do you want to be despised for creating a crisis by making gas, heating oil and electricity unaffordable, especially at the coldest part of the year. Are you nuts??”

The American Navy is strutting their stuff, demonstrating pride in having the most powerful force in the Iranian waters and by extension asserting a military threat to Iran while Obama remains oddly silent. Has there been a coup?? The Iranian forces are shown with submarines and naval exercises in the same waters. What kind of dope are they smoking? Bragging about surface to air missiles which they can use to immobilize American boats is about as close to insane as a non-nuclear power can come when agitating against the Americans with their thousands of nuclear missiles. A million murdered Iraqis and four million Iraqi refugees should tell you that Americans do not care about the deaths of others, especially brown people with hard to pronounce names.

This is how wars start. They start years ago with toxic propaganda so that you can start to forget ……….

To forget……..and forget…………that in both of our countries, fathers and mothers will wake up this morning to make breakfast for their children. Grandparents will kiss grandchildren good-bye and send them onto school buses. Family members will tell each other that they love each other and encourage each other to have a good day. A teacher will remember to bring that special book for that student who showed an interest and a passion for that subject. A worker will load up their truck with the tools they need for today’s job and go over their ‘list’.

These are the worlds within worlds which we cannot hold in our awareness at all times, and which Presidents and Admirals do not appear to think about or care about. Now the sanctions kick-in (because we need to look strong) and the counter attacks and reproaches are issued in reply, in an escalating spiral.

This is how wars start.

Rock. Paper. Scissors. Fracking.

tomthumbsgallery — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:43:46 +0000

Dear Friends,

Just having some fun with the Rock.Paper. Scissors. game which appears to be an ordering of power, or values. Rock is covered over by paper; paper is cut by scissors; and, rock can dull scissors. Although the game appears to be played by ‘chance’, a player’s pattern of choices can determine who wins.

What does that have to do with hydrofracking?

(Um….you made me think!)

I guess it is like a hierarchy thing like “being then becoming then belonging’.

One level leads to another and requires the preceding level to move to the next level. Levels are ‘over’ each other. But natural hierarchies do not convey that fracking for gas is a choice communities make about how they will live.

And unlike a ‘head in the clouds’ intellectual ranking, fracking for gas has real environmental consequences.

Fracking is not a game. It is about putting toxic chemicals into our environment.

We can go for ‘more stuff’ through fracking, but then we can’t have clean air and clean water.

In Pennsylvania where they allowed fracking, people can now afford to go and eat at McDonald’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But is that good for their health? With the money from fracking leases they can buy more stuff. Maybe more stuff is not good for us.

And what if we just ‘live’ here and don’t have a gas drilling hydrofracking lease. We still have to breathe the polluted air and drink the polluted water from all of the wastes from drilling; and when the gas wells break and leak toxins into our water wells…..hello sickness and cancer.

More and more of us will be growing our own food or buying it from nearby farms as things get economically tougher. Do we really want to get sick from our own vegetables??

So there’s a nudge about the the low, low value of fracking, more MickeyD fastfood, and more stuff. We do not need any of those and we certainly do not want to get sick and die because of fracking pollution induced illnesses.

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Fracking….. not a child’s game and having serious consequences. And not a game of chance either. We win or lose, depending upon our choices.

Nota bene:

“This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. “(Vaclav Havel.) The Power of The Powerless.

The Bread and Roses Strike, 1912: What strategies worked?

tomthumbsgallery — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:11:51 +0000

HOPE

Lawrenceville, Massachusetts was a textile town which produced almost 45 million dollars worth of woolen and cotton goods per year. Among the forty thousand unskilled workers, only twenty-two thousand were employed due to new labor replacing machines. The average salary was 7.56 dollars per week and the average rent was 6.00 dollars per week. Housing was congested with 58% taking in boarders. Diets consisted of mostly bread and any meat was considered to be a rare delicacy; and malnutrition was rampant. A Congressional study held in March of 1912, later found that 36 of 100 workers died before they were 25 years old and a large number of child-workers died within 2 or 3 years of starting work in the mills. Hence, it only took a spark to ignite the frustrations of this largely disenfranchised group of immigrants and to raise those feelings into a dedicated unified voice for change. In addition, this unvoiced group of workers, never having had a union prior to this time, gained a political voice when organized by union workers from IWW.

A CLEAR, PROVOCATIVE EVENT.

The State of Massachusetts passed a law limiting work weeks to 54 hours a week (down from 56 hours). When Polish working women noticed a drop in their paycheck of 32 cents, or three loaves of bread, they were enraged and shut down the machines. This spark resulted in a general strike whose demands later became threefold: a 15% increase in overall wages; overtime pay for excess hours; and, no reprisals for those involved in the strike. The latter was in response to the employer strategy of simply “killing off” strikers and their families by refusing them any future work in the mills.

NATIONAL SYMPATHY FOR THE STRIKERS.

Strikers were greeted with bayonets. They were hosed with fire hoses in the middle of freezing winter temperatures. When they sent their children to live with supporters in NYC, the local police met them at the train station; and beat women and children and arrested them and placed them in jail. When President Taft’s wife heard about this, a Congressional Investigation was initiated, thus bringing the brutality of the police and mill owner to national attention. The marches of the strikers provided plenty of publicity as the militias’ blocking of the marches and their invocation of martial law and physical violence against the strikers worked to garner more support for the strikers.

ORGANIZED “RELIEF” FOR STRIKERS AND THEIR DEPENDENTS.

IWW helped to provide organizers. They helped the strikers to create relief committees who set up kitchens and food distribution stations. Volunteer doctors gave free medical care. Two to five dollars were given to each family each week so that no family had to go without in order to participate in the strike. As a result the strikers were able to minimize strike related frustrations and to unify as a group which “cared” about each family. In addition, each ethnic group was asked to send two spokespersons to a central organizing group, so every group who were ordinarily suspicious of the others, were represented, guaranteeing fair representation and a sense of “membership”.

CREATION OF A PLAYFUL, NONVIOLENT PRESENCE IN THE TOWN.

During the non-martial-law, daytime hours, striking workers wandered in and out of shops and stores. Their decentralized, leaderless wanderings were unnerving to shop owners and town politicians. To avoid arrest, picket lines moved constantly. They created an atmosphere of gaiety in which singing and dancing were the norm. They were nonviolent in all of their direct actions. Despite bad press which was in the pockets of the mill owners, press which described them as “mobs” and as violent, they overcame all of the brutality and prejudice by being positive and joyful. It is only my opinion, but I suspect that this was the first American strike in which unskilled workers united to shut down a mill town. That the unskilled could unite for a strike was simply a revolutionary event.

Helpful Links:

Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence textile Strike – By Joyce Kornbluh

1912 Lawrence Textile Strike – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To Donate to Occupy Wall Street:

http://occupywallst.org/donate/

Or: http://www.nycga.net/how-to-help/

Occupy Social Responsibility

tomthumbsgallery — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:56:49 +0000

There are at least 500,000 non-profit organizations in the U.S. and they are entitled to special status in our society by virtue of their commission to serve communities by meeting human needs. The future of Occupy movements depends upon these organizations kicking into gear and acting upon their professed goals of helping the downtrodden and of rectifying the injustices of our society.

Today I read that a church was asking for 300.00 dollars a day to pay for heat for the building which they are letting Occupiers in NYC sleep in overnight. That reminds of asking an unemployed relative to give you money, when he or she has no money for rent,–so that they can sleep on your couch. How sleezy is that?

In the past many churches and educational non-profits have refused to take on any social movement which might not find favor with the 1% elite. They have said that they are afraid to lose their special tax status. Or they have said that they want to wait and see what our new political leaders would do. Whatever their rationales were, they were avoidances. They refused to help.

In October, St. Paul’s Church in London refused to help the London Occupiers by allowing them to camp in front of the cathedral. When a vicar turned the police back and asked the occupiers to come into the church for worship, he was soon forced to resign and called a ‘maverick’ by the media. The City of London (a cabal of financiers in their version of Wall Street) has now teamed up with the Cathedral to go to court to evict the occupiers.

With their emphasis on fighting against income inequalities in England and on creating a more fair economy, the Occupiers seem more closely aligned to the virtues of early Christians than do the current occupants of the St. Paul Church. In response to the locking of the St. Paul Cathedral in October and the attempts to smear the Occupiers as unclean and unsafe, I have decided to go into battle. Those hypocrites who claim to help others, while making life hell for the poor on their doorstep, be damned.

N.B. Trinity Church in NYC is refusing to let Occupy Wall Street use their vacant lot at 6th and Canal Street. OWS has several members on a hunger strike to protest Trinity’s decision. Trinity “Church” is one of the largest real estate owners in New York City and was helpful to occupiers on Wall Street in prior months, providing bathrooms and daytime access to their church.

For All Those Camping Cool Cats At Occupy Wall Street.

tomthumbsgallery — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:37:01 +0000

I like it when the protestors come to the protest and stay.

Occupy!

The temperatures in the Park are balmy compared to the chill in the hearts of the bankers who foreclosed on millions of Americans’ homes and in the hearts of the employers who gave pink slips to our jobless; and in the hearts of the politicians who sold their power to the corporations. The violence which every one fears starts in these buildings and in the hearts of the 1%.

At night there is always the glare from the NYPD panopticon device. Inside a metal box suspended in the air above Liberty Park sits a listening post equipped with cameras and manned by a member of the NYPD. Instead of feeling ‘protected’ by the police, occupiers feel spied on and monitored 24/7. This thing sat on the corner of Liberty Park opposite the Prayer Circle during my visit to the Park, like a gigantic bug on a trailer. I counted 19 police cars parked side to side on the north side of the Park. Liberty Park is only 2/3s of an acre and it is surrounded with police barricade fences made of galvanized metal.

My home at Occupy Wall Street was mostly at the Prayer Circle. Burning Sage incense and the rumble of prayers mixed with construction drilling across the street set the humbling tone for the 99% at the feet of these stone idols of Wall Street. Mercy toward each other, honesty about one’s faults and according all persons the respect due to each of us, created sacred space: