Occupy Delaware

Wednesday GA Notes

2012-07-11

Spencer Plaza

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Meeting start: 1910 hr

1 or 2 proposals tonight

We have some new people, some from other Occupies, some from other countries, here tonight!

10-MINUTE THING: we pick a topic to discuss, for informational/educational/entertainment purposes.

Proposed topics:

1) Where we’re going next

We have to ask ourselves why we’re here in the first place. What brought us together. Everybody has an agenda. All the Venn diagrams, where the intersection is, I’m not sure I found that. But I still have hope.

Tomorrow night we’re doing a bank sleep! It means you sleep in front of a bank and annoy the hell out of everyone. AKA sleepful protest.

If we intend to have people who want to continue occupation, in the next location, we went through a vetting process before to determine a place to occupy, so we should investigate another place. I have a preference, the little park at the split of Delaware Ave. in front of the banks. Just an idea. We need to look for another spot.

Whatever we do it has to be a balance of those things really powerful dramatic bold revolutionary transformational with the kind of day-to-day issues we face. Even though you’re revolutionary you still have a family to take care of. The issue I’m trying to get close to is drug war and mass incarceration, related to the city’s violence.

Do more working with the community, the action today was very successful, I’d like to see more of that, like providing fresh produce to fresh-food deprived neighborhoods.

Setting up an occupation in the state capital, Dover, where the politicians are.

There is an Occupy Dover, but they don’t have a site. We voted on that before, and that’s how Occupy Dover come into being. Do we want to have a physical occupation? If so, then where?

The key word is transformation. To continue with an encampment in my humble opinion would be a waste of resources, dealing with the bullshit in the camp. It’s time we look forward. It really isn’t doing anything, except being a thorn in Their side, which is good. If you want to sleep outside, bank sleep, sleep in front of a politician’s house. Occupy Philly has done away with their GA and empowered their working groups to do everything. Just report-backs, once a month. It’s another option.

We are in transition, moving on to better things. This place has never lost its usefulness, I love this place, and I want to honor everyone who’s been here, dealing with everything. Despite the pressure, we’ve survived.

Is there a distinction between working and affinity groups and which would we’d like to have? And there are elections coming and we have policy decisions to make and we’ll individually be working for candidates.

From what I’ve seen the loss of encampments has resulted as a loss of community among the groups because the action working groups lose track of each other. So we need to have frequent whole-group meetings.

This discussion will go on for awhile, with a lot of give-and-take, and elections are coming. What do we do afterwards? During that time, how to we discuss elections?

Our goal should be to stick together as our community until the shit hits the fan again, and it’s gonna happen. There’s going to be another right time, this is not over yet, where people will be wanting to go out into the streets agains. So we should keep our community tight until that time we’re needed to go into action again to get people out in the streets.

REPORT-BACKS

Wilmington Rally, thanks to visitors we had a very successful food giveaway, food from Occupiers and Sav-A-Lot. And we had a person come up and say “Occupy has finally come to Delaware,” and others very generously offered their support.

Last Saturday I attended the CBTU meeting, warmly received, acknowledged, offered a chance to speak for a couple minutes. I was there to network, trying to build relationships. I’ll go every month, first Saturdays.

At I-95/Delaware Ave. Wilmington Rally, we had 7 people and great reception. Went to the Sheriff Sale yesterday representing ODE, 21 pages of foreclosures, there were 3 county cops there waiting for us to do something.

Legal committee met on the 3rd, 5th and 10th. Things are ongoing, we’ve empowered the lawyer to act on our behalf and we’re waiting for results. I got a call from Rich Morse, unrelated to anything the legal committee has been asked to deal with.

The Media/Communications committee has prepared a press release, recounting the history and accomplishments, goals and continuation of ODE.

PROPOSALS

Proposal 1: We tweak our process to allow all facilitators to vote on proposals.

Factual Information

[none]

Clarifying Questions

What is going to be the vote counting process? Will it remain the same? We haven’t had official counters since way back. Are we going to be responsible to itself to vote and acknowledge that vote, with no neutral party county the votes, is there some clarification for how that process would go that the counter would also count his/her own vote.

I’d like to add to my proposal, the facilitators counting and voting have to publicly announce the count and everyone has to agree on the count.

Would it be OK to say, absent an objection to the vote count and a second to the objection, would that be OK? That makes sense to me.

Concerns

The language that’s sort of added, it’s not going to be exactly how it works. With a small group everybody can see the vote. With a large group a transparent process is needed, 2 counters to verify each other’s count. The way it’ll happen we’ll have to improvise a little bit when the group is small.

If we don’t allow the facilitators and counters and stack takers to vote we’re not hearing all the voices participating in the process. There’s nothing in the proposal that negates the option to use 2 or more counters, which can be decided contingently. And we can change the process again to adapt as necessary.

We shouldn’t bog down our process with process.

The reason I’ve brought this proposal is to formalize what we’ve been doing anyway. And I wanted to allow the facilitators to vote.

Amendments

[none]

Change the process to allow facilitators to vote.

Straw Poll: + 12 – 0
Binding Vote: + 18, – 0

Proposal carries.

Proposal 2: Focus more on electronic media, videos.

Factual Information

That’s a way we could go.

This sounds like things we can just do, doesn’t need a proposal and a vote. It’s a great idea and the Action committee will get together and talk about it.

Videos take a lot of time and work, scripting, filming, editing…It’s great, I’m for it, but it needs to be planned.

Proposal withdrawn. Action meetings usually happen after the GA.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Accepting Responsibility for Building Our Communities, an event, August 11, 2012. Hosted by Our Time, Lorane Movahi.

I have tickets for a $10 jazz concert fundraiser for Pacem in Terris, 2 hour concert, at 8th and Shiply, this Saturday at 7 pm. See Laura. Steve will be there! Unless three people who buy tickets want him to stay home.

This Fri-Sat is the national Green Party convention in Baltimore. Saturday at 11 is the presidential convention, a fun way to meet the candidates, this Saturday, the 14th, contact Bernie. There are two candidates, Jill Stein and Roseanne Barr. Jill Stein announced Sherry Honkala as her VP.

July 22, we can have a table/presence at the Bob Marley Festival. Contact Dassi. Noon to 10 pm. If you’re working a table you get free admission!

Stuff going down in DC in a few days, on the 17 Day of Action against BoA, awesome tactics, cool stuff. On the 18th, Occupy Congress going to House of Reps and Senate building and bothering the shit out of them. Glass-Steagall reinstated. Tuesday, Wednesday next week.

Ocean City, NJ solidarity with the Eskimos, who are having what’s left of their culture drowned in oil. Alaskawild.org. http://ourarcticocean.org/vigils.html

Tomorrow is the city council meeting, at the City-County Building. There’s a group people, the Leased Access Programmers Association, to put pressure on the city to keep live access TV. Tthey’ll go to pre-recorded, with no room for community building. Occupy has been on open-access at least 3 times, this is a group of people we need to be in contact with. Public comment period, 6-7, signup time is 5:15-5:45. Come, wear an Occupy t-shirt, to show solidarity. There will also be a large contingent of people concerned about the recent gun violence in the city. Comcast has been dragging their feet for 2 years and this is the 2nd proposal they’ve submitted and it still doesn’t have the live public access language in it. Council wants to do the right thing and they need support.

Related to the Comcast, Comcast has a monopoly in Wilmington, and the issue is to break that monopoly up. Comcast will make $114 million in profit from this city over the next 10 years. Using the public commons, airways.

We do need to still educate the people about Occupy, there’s a lot of people who still don’t know what Occupy’s about.

Meeting adjourned: 2012 hr

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