Friday, October 14, 2011


If all the people who have lost their homes were to protest -  half the country would be in Zucotti Park.  Of course this is an exaggeration, however, we all know the numbers would be huge.

The London Guardian is offering hour by hour coverage of the NY protests.

MTH
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London Guardian: Occupy Wall Street: protesters fear eviction - live coverage

Occupy Wall Street protesters are bracing themselves for eviction as police insist they will not be allowed to keep sleeping equipment in Zuccotti Park after it is cleaned.
Follow live updates on Twitter @AdamGabbatt
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street protesters march through the financial district in New York. There are fears they could be evicted this week Photograph: Tina Fineberg/AP
5pm: That's it for today, thanks for reading. Meetings are taking place at Occupy Wall Street to discuss how to prevent the demonstration from effectively being evicted tomorrow. NYPD have confirmed that protesters will be able to remain in Zuccotti Park while it is cleaned, but said they will not be allowed to keep sleeping equipment in the area.
Brookfield properties is set to clean Zuccotti Park at 7am, but Occupy Wall Street have called for a demonstration from 6am in a bid to retain control of the area. With protesters not prepared to give up their space and equipment, but police insist they are not allowed to keep sleeping bags, tarpaulin, or containers at the site.
I'll be at Occupy Wall Street overnight, tweeting and filing pictures in the build up to the supposed eviction. Follow me on Twitter @AdamGabbatt for live updates.
4.17pm: This morning Reuters ran an article claiming that George Soros was secretly funding Occupy Wall Street, which has caused rather a lot of intrigue online.
Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.
New York Magazine has been looking into Reuters' assertions. The verdict? "The evidence, unlike the innuendo, is awfully thin":
Reuters explains that, like Occupy Wall Street, plenty of Republican congressmen, and the tea party, Soros opposed the bank bailout. And this week the billionaire said he could "understand the sentiment" of the protesters — not exactly a ringing endorsement, and an opinion also shared by Bill Clinton, Ben Bernanke, and at least one member of the Buffet family.
The indirect financial link is as follows: Soros funds the organization Open Society, which between 2007 and 2009 gave $3.5 million to a group called the Tides Center, a clearinghouse for liberal donors that distributes grants of more than $100 million each year. The Tides Center gave $185,000 between 2001 and 2010 to Adbusters — the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist organization that helped conceive of Occupy Wall Street — and $26,000 of that came between 2007 and 2009.
So, to sum up, years before the Occupy Wall Street protests were even a gleam in anyone's eye, a trickle of Soros's money went to one of the groups involved. Compared to the Koch brothers and their well-documented financial ties to the tea party, it is very nearly a rounding error...more

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