Bloomberg's Army

Contact:                      Nellie Hester Bailey: 646-812-5188/ 212-663-5248

                                    Tony Savino:  646-334-2613

On Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at St. Philip’s Church, 204 West 134^th Street (off Adam Clayton Powell Blvd) from 6 PM to 9 PM Occupy Harlem General Assembly (OHGA) features keynote speakers, Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General, Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report and Carl Dix of Stop “Stop-and-Frisk” Civil Disobedience campaign. In addition, student representatives from Columbia University and Stop Tuition Hikes at CUNY will address the OHGA.

Ramsey Clark will deliver a global analysis on U.S. wars and occupations today. Clark, founder of the International Action Center, a major anti-war organization, received the United Nations’ Human Rights award in 2008. 

Recognized by the progressive left as the leading Black intellectual voice in the US, Glen Ford said, “Occupy can only fulfill its promise to build on the contributions of previous movements if it decisively confronts the overarching issue of race, the Great Contradiction at the heart of American life and history that has always thwarted the development of an enduring Left movement”.
Carl Dix, who along with Cornel West initiated Stop “Stop-and-Frisk” Civil Disobedience actions cited more than 700,000 Stop & Frisk by the New York City Police Department in 2011. The overwhelming numbers were Black and Latino men who also constitute nearly two thirds of the 2.3 million people languishing in the profitable US Jim Crow prison industrial complex.

Nellie Hester Bailey and Sandra Rivers, co-conveners of Occupy Harlem and facilitators of the Dec. 21^st meeting announced the overall theme of its fourth and last general assembly for 2011: Permanency and Relevancy of Occupy Movements in Black, Latino & Immigrant Communities. Bailey said, “2012, the presidential election year, becomes pivotal for the occupy movement. Will it collapse into yet another extension of the Democratic Party or emerge truly independent, casting off the yoke of endless betrayals from a supine party that never cease to serve the 1% Wall Street Plutocracy?”

Rivers added, “OHGA will map out a strategic independent grassroots movement building plan for 2012 with occupy targets, conferences and principle collaboration with key partners including Occupy Wall Street.”

OCCUPY HARLEM PROPOSAL

OCCUPY HARLEM  MODIFIED PROPOSAL DUE TO IN-KIND SUPPORT FROM OWS AND DONATED COMMUNITY RESOURCES

Occupy Harlem General Assembly (OHGA) submits this funding proposal. OHGA requests the support and facilitation of the working groups listed below in addition to any other Occupy Wall Street working groups recommended. OHGA is anxious to present its proposal to Occupy Wall Street General Assembly and wish to secure a date to do so as soon as possible.

OHGA organized a number of working groups based on issues addressed at its first GA  and subsequent meetings. OHGA continues to develop working group committees.

OHGA primary objective: raise funds for an independent Occupy Harlem Movement not controlled by elected officials (servants of the 1%) or NGOs funded and thus controlled by politicians.

OHGA physical presence in Central Harlem, historically recognized as the epicenter of the world renowned Harlem Renaissance Movement, challenges a political landscape dominated by well oiled machines of patronage, serious obstacles to the survival of authentic grassroots movements without independent resources. Funding from OWS dramatically changes this paradigm.    

 OHGA last two general assemblies held at Saint Phillip's Church forced the issue of its future survival without any resources. Attempting to build an organizational infrastructure for sustainable programs and actions simply is not possible without funding.

The problem: St. Philip's Church like so many other churches in Harlem lives with the reality of dwindling congregants. The church cannot afford to rent space gratis. To meet the expenses for its first GA, Occupy Harlem received a donation of $150 from the United National Anti-War Coalition. Those funds paid for space rental and payment of the custodian. At its second meeting OHGA  turned over $100 in donations to the church. However, this arrangement is clearly not sustainable.

In negotiations with St. Philips OHGA worked out what it believes to be a reasonable financial agreement. For three hours of meeting time Occupy Harlem will pay $125 and $75 for the custodian, a total of $200 per meeting in a venue with heat, an important consideration for the winter months.  And easy access for transportation: 2 or 3 train to 135th or the C to 135th St./St. Nicholas Avenue.

Please bear in mind OHGA base of operation is in Central Harlem or Black Harlem: (1) the target of brutal gentrification assaults that has resulted in forced migration, rising evictions, homelessness, (2) Predatoryan epidemic of Black unemployment, (4) Predatory commercial real estate that has destroyed small Black Businesses in record numbers (4) the deliberate elimination of social service safety networks for the poor and working class intended to accelerate the gentrification push out (5) one of seven neighborhoods in NYC feeding predominately Black youth into New York State's prison industrial complex.

Summary of Strategic Planning in Occupy Harlem General Assembly Proposal:
(a) Regular bi-monthly meetings
(b) Establish social media networks
(c) Monthly direct actions i.e. rallies, demonstrations, panels at OWS, popular education,
(d) Occupy Harlem conferences in the Spring and Fall of 2011: Projected venue: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The two conferences will correspond with two mass demonstrations.
(e) Regional Conference in Harlem: Assessment and the Future of Occupy movements in communities of Color
(f) a National Conference. The goal: gathering of progressive forces from across the US and hopefully internationally to assess, strategize and build a united front of solidarity against the 1%.
(e) OHGA Open Space Occupation (not discussed in any details in this proposal for security reasons.)

We recognize we are citizens of the world, and have a responsibility to shape this new and challenging global environment. We view Occupy Wall Street as a strategic portal for the liberation of all of the 99% best accomplished with strategic planning and mutual cooperation.

OCCUPY HARLEM GENERAL ASSEMBLY BUDGET

December 1, 2011 -  December 31, 2012:**

*Space Rental for Bi-Monthly Meetings (St. Phillip's Church, 204 W 134th St): ($400 x 13 months) = $5200

Occupy Harlem Conference: Spring 2012 Schomburg Center: $4500

*Schomburg Conference:Travel and Reception: $1,500
Audio and Videotaping: Community Volunteers

Fall Conference 2012 (Riverside Church/Social Justice Committee): $1,500
Audio and Videotaping: Community Volunteers

Legal (Fine and Bail Contingencies): -$5000* (Partial support requested when and if needed)

Website: -$500 (Technical Support from OWS and community volunteer)

Printing: -$2500 (In-kind contribution from OWS)

Signage: -$2000 (In-kind support from OWS)

Outdoor Demonstrations/Rallies/Direct Actions/13 months:-$650 (Expenditure covered through community fundraisers)+

Video production-archival footage of activities/programs: -$1, 650 (Community donation/volunteers)

TOTAL $12,700

Budget Summary:
*With respect to the conferences we request OWS to release funds payable directly to the specific institutions upon signing a contract.
* Space rental is the most crucial issue for Occupy Harlem. The fourth GA meeting is on December 21st at St . Philips Church. Occupy Harlem has to paid the church $200. The last payment was paid by a senior on fixed income. Currently we have no other prospects and we want very much to reimburse the senior.

Thank you. On behalf of Occupy Harlem: Nellie Bailey 212-663-5248/646-812-5188 and Sandra Rivers 917-620-2041 oremail:occupyharlemgeneralassembly@gmail.com.

Events in West Harlem About Columbia University Expansion

Jobs Protest organized by the St. Mary’s group on Friday, December 9 at 3:00 P.M. starting at 116th and Broadway and proceeding uptown to the Columbia “employment” center on Broadway just below 125th.

Friday night, December 9, at 7 or 7:30, there will be a showing of a film, “The Battle for Brooklyn” about Prospect Heights construction at the Maysles Cinema, 343 Lenox Ave. between 127th and 128th Sts.. Tom Kappner and Yoni Golijov from CPC will be speakers in a panel discussion about the effect of the Columbia expansion on the surrounding communities following the films.

Occupy the Hood Visits Occupy Harlem

Occupy Harlem General Assembly November 9, 2011

National Day of Action November 17

This is Sumumba from OWS (OUTREACH), below are some guides for November 17th day of action....if you have any question please call me at 646-778-6766.

On November 17, 3 pm, the National DAY OF ACTION, people will gather at subway hubs in all boroughs and head together to Foley Square. We need peopleto bottomline each of these hubs!

In all five boroughs, dozens of people at 8 main transport hubs will gather at 3:00 pm to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors. Then they will lead their neighbors to join tens of thousands as we reclaim our democracy! They will take their own stories to the trains, using the "People's Mic". They will rise up from the underground to join thousands of others gathered in the light of day, at Foley Square, just across from City Hall.

How are they going to tell their story? And how will they get from point A to point B? Maybe you'd like to make that happen!

There will be 3 people bottomlining each hub - a contact at a local organization, and two people from OWS. The OWS bottomliners will do the following:

*Pick up flyers (and if possible a little food from Kitchen) downtown, to distribute at 3:00 and on the subway.

*Show up at 2:00 and greet the main storyteller of the day. Give them an introduction to using the 'People's Mic' - i.e. only use 4 words at a time, wait for people to finish echoing before starting the next phrase, etc.

*At 3:00, after those gathered hear this person's story, give people gathered a brief intro to using the People's Mic on the train.

*Ask people if they have stories to tell on the trains. If not, give them some paper to write on (maybe just the backs of the flyers), and take 15 minutes to jot some ideas.

*Walk people over to the trains, and assure that the area you leave behind is clean.

Main Hubs:

Bronx: Fordham Rd; and 3rd Ave/138thBrooklyn: Broadway Junction; and Borough HallQueens: Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave; and Jamaica Center Parsons Archer Manhattan: 125th St; and Union SquareStaten Island: St George/Staten Island Ferry

*Make sure everyone gets on and off the train together. Make sure flyers are handed out on the train-ride there. Assure that the People's Mic is working on the train by designating a human mic at each end of the train.

*Lead people off the train to the march at Foley Square.

That's it, plain and simple!

Occupy Harlem Author Sues Disney for Theft of Nun Story

Image from Sister Act The Musical in New York.

Image: Jeff Christensen/AP/Press Association Images

IT TURNS OUT Sister Act may have been based on a true story.
Remember that film starring Whoopi Goldberg about a pretend nun in Harlem whose former life involved a mobster boyfriend and a Las Vegas singing career?  Just this week, a nun has claimed that the movie is actually based on her 1987 autobiography, reports the Hollywood Reporter.


Nearly 20 years after the film Sister Act premiered in cinemas across the world, Delois Blakely has decided to sue Walt Disney Co. and Sony Pictures for basically stealing her book and using it as inspiration for the film.
After the autobiography was published, the Harlem nun brought it to a bunch of producers in the hopes of seeing her life transformed for the silver screen. Describing herself as a “young, Black, singing nun serving the street people and youths of Harlem”, she filed suit stating she first pitched the idea to Tri-Star Pictures.  According to Business Insider, Tri-Star Pictures expressed interest in the rights. However, Scott Rudin then took the project to Disney and the film was made without the nun’s involvement.


As far as we can tell, there was no mention of a proposal for Sister Act 2 in her lawsuit.  However, there are some similarities other than the black, singing nun in Harlem description. Goldberg’s character in Sister Act was called Deloris – just one letter off Delois…hmmm.
She is kind of bad-ass as well - currently, she is heading up the Occupy Harlem protests and has been named the community mayor of the borough.  Despite those facts, we must question whether the woman who was profiled in the New York Times as Harlem’s Queen Mother in 2003 had a murderous (and married) boyfriend or such a love-hate relationship with a mother superior (that bares a resemblence to Maggie Smith).
Here at TheJournal.ie, we also doubt that Blakely ever did this:

OCCUPY HARLEM CAMPAIGN “on the move”

Next Working Groups Meeting: Friday, Nov. 11th 2011 -

St. Mary’s Church

521 W. 126th St.

(between Amsterdam Ave. & Old Broadway)

6 PM to 8 PM.

Requested Donation for the church ….

Directions: #1 Broadway Local to 125th or

A to 125th/Walk five blocks west to Amsterdam Avenue.

Telephone: 646-812-5188


  Special Reports:
Research report: 477 West 142nd Street
 Columbia University Expansion: a gentrification scheme of ethnic cleansing in West Harlem:

The Payoff: a corrupt West Harlem Local Development Corporation: Where is the Community Benefits Money for the West Harlem community? Is it the latest thief by Black elected officials led by Congressman Charles Rangel?
Columbia University and the Banks: CU President Lee Bollinger, chair of the Board of Directors, the New York Federal Reserve Bank. OCCUPY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY!
Wall Street swallows Carver Federal Savings, the oldest Black run Bank for a measly 55 million dollars.

November 17th Shutting Down Wall  Street


This is a working meeting for adopted proposals to set up working groups: Housing, Media,  and other working committees folks would like to work on or introduce.

1) For a Housing Working Group General Assembly Discussion
 

A) Unanimous vote for Occupy Harlem to  adopt as its campaign the preservation of 477 West 142nd Street HDFC as a low income home ownership community asset. To that end the working group agreed to conduct research on the building; meeting with all shareholders; issue public statement on the preservation of  477 West 142nd HDFC  and all HDFC as low income home ownership community asset; hold a press conference;  


 2)  Convene a People’s Public Hearing on Gentrification in Harlem: Evictions, Predatory Landlords, Predatory Harassment, Foreclosures,

3) Adopted policy statement on gentrification and ethnic cleansing including predatory investors and predatory harassing.

4) Sponsor teach-in - including films: (a) Boom, the Sound of Eviction  (b) The Rezoning of 125th Street  (c) The Vanishing City

5) Campaign for preservation of all low-income housing housing stock and the creation of more.

6) Set up Eviction Alert


7) Set up Legal Support 

Media Working Group: immediate priority setting up website Setting up liaison  reps with working committees of OWS i.e. People of Color, Outreach, Direct Action, Arts & Culture, 

General Coordinating Working Group to execute adopted proposal, it is not a permanent working group: 

Nellie, Rivik, Tony, David, Rebecca, Laura, Jeanette, Dr. Bhya, Sabin

Harlem Poet at Wall Street Protest

Stop "Stop and Frisk"!

A new uncompromising movement against NYPD’s notorious Stop & Frisk program began yesterday as hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Harlem State Office Building to Harlem’s 28th precinct. At the station, Cornel West, author and Princeton professor, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Rev. Stephen Phelps, interim senior minister of Riverside Church, and dozens of others were arrested in an act of non-violent civil disobedience. Among those arrested and protesting was a large contingent from downtown’s Occupy Wall Street.

“We are here today to put our bodies on the line to stop this racist, immoral, illegitimate and unjust ‘new Jim Crow’ from the gateway of stop and frisk to the wholesale mass incarceration of Black and Brown people,” said Dix to the assembled marchers. “We are serious and we will continue until we Stop Stop & Frisk!” The crowd chanted, “Stop & Frisk don’t stop the crime, Stop & Frisk IS the crime,” as arrestees were carried to waiting police vans. A solidarity march to 33rd Precinct ensused, where arrestees were said to be held.

According to a New York Civil Liberties Union study, the NYPD is on pace to stop and frisk over 700,000 people in 2011, or more than 1,900 people each day. More than 85% of those stopped and frisked are Black or Latino, and more than 90% of them were doing nothing wrong when the police stopped them.

The action was organized in solidarity with #occupyharlem, which will begin on October 28th.

Occupy Harlem Campaign Launched

New York’s Harlem is in the process of occupying itself. "We need a radical transformation of the current status quo – the banks financing and controlling the political process, buying out politicians in both parties to protect the economic interest of the one percent.” The neighborhood that was once the nexus of Black political thought, and is now besieged by forces of gentrification, is making its own place in the national movement against corporate power. “Attendees eagerly came forward to propose a wide range of issues from the local to the international.”

by Donna Lamb

This article originally appeared in Black Star News.

“We must organize for our own economic and political defense.”

As Occupy Wall Street continues to galvanize America and numerous Occupy movements keep springing up in cities, towns and communities across the nation, it was only a matter of time before Harlem residents and activists took the bull by the horns and brought the initiative uptown.

On the evening of October 28, about 150 people, many of them born and raised in Harlem, attended the first Occupy Harlem general assembly, held at St. Philip's Church in Central Harlem. Nellie Bailey, who is with Harlem Fightback Against War at Home and Abroad as well as a member of the United National Antiwar Coalition, was a co-convener.

There were many proposals dealing with economics and jobs, including a request to endorse "Jobs for ALL," a massive public works and public service program to create 25 million new jobs at union wages, to be paid for by new taxes on the wealth and income of the rich, on financial transactions, and on corporate profits.

Two political proposals sought endorsement of the Occupy Congress campaign to occupy the local offices of members of Congress unless they sign a pledge to vote down any proposed cuts to working people's programs and for a congressional hearing in Washington, DC to address the second-class status of independent voters, which make up 41 percent of the electorate.

There were also important proposals regarding issues affecting Continental Africans, such as the Nuba Mountain peoples in southern Sudan, and people of African descent throughout the Diaspora, including Haiti.

“Participants proposed to occupy the local offices of members of Congress unless they sign a pledge to vote down any proposed cuts to working people's programs.”

"Occupy Harlem can only survive as a people's movement with the direct involvement of the 99 percent to affect change," Nellie Bailey said. "We need a radical transformation of the current status quo – the banks financing and controlling the political process, buying out politicians in both parties to protect the economic interest of the one percent. Poor and working class people in Harlem and throughout the country are suffering," she continued. "We aren't going to take it anymore. Occupy Wall Street is our blueprint."

Joining Bailey was Black Agenda Radio commentator Glen Ford. "We can't just wait for the people downtown in Occupy Wall Street to stand up for us. We must organize for our own economic and political defense," he said.

Added Larry Adams of the People's Organization for Progress, "We must take action because the recession in America is a full-blown depression for Black America."

Focusing attention on one of Harlem's grave concerns was guest speaker Carl Dix, national spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party. He stressed the urgent need to end the NYPD's "stop and frisk" policy that is harassing and humiliating countless innocent people.

Dix told of one Black young man who was stopped and frisked on his way to get some chicken. After the police officer found that the young man had no record, instead of just releasing him, the officer told him to do the chicken noodle soup dance and then he would let him go. "I don't want to live in a country where our Black young men are treated like that," declared Dix. "It is a burning injustice, and we want to tap into a supportive mood around resisting it and to link in with people who are trying to deal with it on other levels."

“We recognize the need of the Harlem community to freely express itself.”

The microphone was opened to all, and attendees eagerly came forward to propose a wide range of issues from the local to the international that they thought should be supported or endorsed by Occupy Harlem.

For instance, at the local level there were proposals to support the continued opposition to the planned 50-year expansion of Columbia University that threatens to take over Harlem; to endorse the struggle against the privatization of Harlem's public housing; and to fight the closing of the Harlem post office, which will devastate many Harlemites who don't have bank accounts and must rely on postal money orders to pay their bills. There was also a proposal to support Harlem's community gardens that provide food, making the community less dependent on outside sources.

Along with the many issues proposed, there was robust discussion regarding procedures and a number of other items. Said Bailey: "As we feel our way in these uncharted waters, we recognize the need of the Harlem community to freely express itself. That is what we tried to do tonight instead of going by a format that others may use in their Occupy movements. As we move forward, we will work these issues out through a democratic and transparent process."

At its next general assembly Occupy Harlem will begin considering the proposals voiced at this first meeting and organizing working committees, a crucial step forward to sustain and coalesce the movement.

For further information call (646) 812-5188 or email OccupyHarlemgeneralassembly@gmail.com.