Tomorrow, Occupy Oakland has called for a general strike in the city; sympathetic actions will also take place in cities around the country. There seems no way to know how big the action will be, but given that there appears to be support by at least some unions, by the school district, and even by the city itself? We'll see what happens.
Today in Occupy-related news:
- The big question: is it working?
As David Dayen notes, the anger over the proposed fees, combined with the protests, have led to several companion movements, such as National Bank Transfer day. Dayen speculates that the protests “revitalized a citizen’s movement to take money out of the large Wall Street banks and to put it into community banks or credit unions.”
In terms of today’s news, I just got off the phone with a senior banking official familiar with the discussions about Bank of America’s decision. This official said there was no direct correlation between the protests and the decision, and argued that the move by other banks to back off the fees left BoA no choice. But the official acknowledged that the atmosphere has been changed in a palpable way by the protests and by media coverage of them. Obama and leading Dems have aligned themselves with the shift in public mood by also hammering BoA.
“It’s all connected,” the official said.
Oh, it's definitely working. The only question is how much it will work. Helping to publicize general hostility towards the banks certainly led at least indirectly to Bank of America rescinding their debit card fee; getting individual foreclosure cases reviewed, a much more direct action. The protests have certainly played a large role in shifting the focus in Washington from all-deficit, all-the-time to the unemployment crisis and increasing income inequality. You would be forgiven, though, for wanting all of those to be mere precursors to more fundamental reforms. And those, as of the moment, are still not forthcoming.
- In Iowa, Occupy protesters are planning to target the Iowa caucuses.
The plan, Cordaro told CNN, is “people coming to Iowa, occupying every presidential [candidate’s] office, shutting them down until they start talking real turkey about what’s going on in this country, where the 99 percent of the people who are not benefiting, at the expense of the 1 percent who are getting away with murder.” [...]
Ed Fallon, the organizer of Occupy Iowa, told the Register details of the sit-ins are still being ironed out but that “the idea is to basically take over until we get response to our satisfaction or we are forcibly removed.”
I don't know about this one. Occupying a political candidate's doorstep until you get a straight answer from them sounds like the recipe for a slow, lingering death.
- In London, St Paul's Cathedral has suspended efforts to evict Occupy protestors outside the church. Three of the church's officials had resigned to protest the eviction. Better late then never? Maybe. But still late.
- Eric Cantor's luck on being able to dodge dissenters ran out yesterday, when protesters stood up and turned their backs to him during his speech at the University of Michigan. If Cantor's speech was as dull and rambling as his last speeches, he owes those protestors for at least livening the place up a bit.
- The Oakland Police Officer Association has released an open letter asking the Oakland city leaders to get their act together. The immediate impetus seems to be the decision by the city to let city workers other than police officers honor the general strike tomorrow, while ordering all police officers to show up for work even if it's their day off.
The Mayor and her Administration are beefing up police presence for Wednesday’s work strike they are encouraging and even “staffing,” spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for additional police presence [...] All of these mixed messages are confusing.
- The Weekly Standard (Bill Kristol's stomping grounds) continues to go with the Kristol-cooked notion that Occupy is anti-Semitic. Jewish American leaders, however, are having none of it. I tremble to think what James O'Keefe is going to dress up as for this one.
- Occupy San Francisco provided assistance to a local woman who had been robbed and stabbed. After the robbery, the woman and her husband took a cab to the nearby Occupy camp, which they knew had a medical tent set up; the Occupy protestors then notified police. A strange and grim story, but one lesson to cities might be "let the protestors have their medical tents." The way Super Congress is going, Occupy tents might be the primary form of national healthcare before too long.
- Occupy Wall Street's first financial report is out: the group received over $450,000 from Sept. 16 through Oct. 18.
There is obviously too much that goes on to condense into a single roundup: For more Occupy news, follow the Occupy Wall Street group and the Occupy Wall Street tag right here on Daily Kos.