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press@occupywallst.org
For this event: William Scott, 412-390-6510
What: Press conference to address the destruction of the OWS People's Library by Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the 11/15 raid.
*Photo Opportunity* All of the recovered, destroyed books will be at the press conference.
Where: 260 Madison Ave, 20th Floor, between 38th and 39th St
When: Wednesday, November 23, at 12:00 noon
So far, the People's Library has received 1,099 books back from the Dept. of Sanitation after last week's raid (some of which were not library books to begin with), and out of these, about 800 are still usable. About 2,900 books are still unaccounted for, and less than one-fifth of the original collection is still usable. These numbers may change slightly when the People's Library gets an exact count of the recent (and final) retrievals from Sanitation, but not considerably.
"The People's Library was destroyed by NYPD acting on the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the night of the raid. In addition to all our supplies, laptops, and tent, they threw roughly 4,000 books into garbage trucks and dumpsters that were adjacent to the park, as well as assorted rare documents that were associated with OWS," says William Scott, an Occupy Wall Street Librarian.
Watch video of the NYPD and Dept. of Sanitation destroying the OWS People's Library tent apart and throwing away all the books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTkUjQwHf4I
Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan's Financial District, and has spread to more than 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. For more visit https://occupywallst.org
"No one is really OK with a corporation lying to consumers. What jumps out here is the overwhelming agreement among voters that it's deceptive and wrong for companies to label a product as recyclable when it's not."
Most U.S. voters would support officials in their state taking legal action against the plastics and fossil fuel industries for creating plastic pollution, based on evidence that they misled the public about the viability of recycling their products, according to a poll released Monday.
The poll, conducted by Data for Progress and the Center for Climate Integrity, follows a report CCI released in February that showed decades of industry deception about the recyclability of plastics and a yearslong, ongoing investigation by the California attorney general, which could lead to a lawsuit.
The poll indicates that 70% of voters support such a lawsuit and even 54% of Republicans do so.
"Regardless of your politics, no one is really OK with a corporation lying to consumers," Davis Allen, a CCI researcher, said in a statement. "What jumps out here is the overwhelming agreement among voters that it's deceptive and wrong for companies to label a product as recyclable when it's not."
Allen's colleague Alyssa Johl, a CCI vice president, argued that the poll bolsters the case that attorneys general should pursue lawsuits against industry for its role in creating plastic waste and deceiving the public about recycling.
"As we're watching to see what comes from California's investigation, it's clear that the public is very concerned about the plastic waste crisis and would support holding Big Oil and the plastics industry accountable for the fraud of plastic recycling," she said. "Any attorney general or public official who is considering action on this issue should know that both the law and public opinion are on their side."
📣 New poll from us & @DataProgress:
The vast majority of U.S. voters — including 54% of Republicans — support legal action against Big Oil & the plastics industry for lying about the viability of plastic recycling and causing the plastic waste crisis. https://t.co/YFjmxzeOYT pic.twitter.com/0oHAMHPtem
— Center for Climate Integrity (@climatecosts) September 9, 2024
The survey, conducted on 1,231 web panel respondents, also included a number of other plastics-related questions. More than two-thirds of respondents, after being prompted with information during the course of the survey, said the plastics industry should have "a great deal of responsibility" to address the plastic crisis, while 59% said the same about the fossil fuel industry. The industries are in fact connected; almost all plastics are made out of fossil fuels.
More than 60% of respondents strongly agreed—and 85% agreed at least "somewhat"—that it was deceptive to put the "chasing arrows" symbol on products that were not in fact recyclable. California restricted the practice with a 2021 law, and the Federal Trade Commission is revising its guidelines following recommendations issued last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which said the use of the symbol can be "deceptive or misleading."
The poll showed that Americans tend to overestimate the amount of plastic being recycled. The average respondent guessed that about 45% of plastic gets recycled, when in fact a 2021 Greenpeace report indicated that the real figure is about 6%.
Despite the negative impacts of plastic waste, plastic production continues to increase worldwide. About 220 million tons of plastic waste are expected to be generated this year alone. Last week, a study in Nature, a leading journal, estimated global plastic waste emissions at about 52 million metric tons per year.
Recycling plastic is logistically challenging because many products are made of composites of different types of plastic and because the quality of the material goes down with each generation of use.
The poll comes out during the final stages of negotiations on a global plastics treaty, which has been in the works for several years. Ahead of United Nations General Assembly meetings this week, a group of celebrities including Bette Midler called for strong action on plastics in an open letter published by Greenpeace.
The final global plastics treaty negotiations will be held in Busan, South Korea starting November 25. The previous major round of negotiations, in April, was dominated by corporate lobbyists, advocates said. Activists and Indigenous leaders were also left out of a smaller meeting in Thailand last month, drawing criticism.
The call for accountability for plastics producers comes as the fossil fuel industry already faces legal action for its role in perpetuating the climate crisis. Dozens of cities and states have filed suits. None has yet reached the trial stage. The one that is closest to doing so, City and County of Honolulu v. Sunoco et al., has been the subject of political and legal wrangling, with the industry trying to have the suit dismissed.
"The international community must act urgently to enact an arms embargo and sanctions to protect Palestinian children's lives," said one campaigner.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 140 Palestinian children in the illegally occupied West Bank since last October—a rate of one child every two days—according to an analysis released Monday.
The report, published by Defense of Children International-Palestine (DCIP), details how Israeli occupation forces "routinely targeted Palestinian children with live ammunition and aerial attacks, prevented ambulances and paramedics from reaching wounded children, and confiscated children's bodies in violation of international law" in the 10 months after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants.
"Israeli forces are killing Palestinian children with calculated brutality and cruelty all throughout the occupied Palestinian territory," DCIP general director Khaled Quzmar said in a statement. "The international community must act urgently to enact an arms embargo and sanctions to protect Palestinian children's lives."
DCIP field researchers conducted interviews and collected evidence documenting 141 children killed by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops and settlers in the West Bank between October 7, 2023 and July 31, 2024. As Common Dreams recently reported, that's around a 250% increase from the nine months preceding the October 7 attack.
Among the report's key findings:
"When an Israeli soldier targets a Palestinian child, or an Israeli military official orders the targeting of a child, they are in violation of international human rights, humanitarian, and criminal law," DCIP accountability program director Ayed Abu Eqtaish said Monday. "Not a single person has been held accountable for the killing of these children, emboldening Israeli forces to continue killing with impunity."
The new report comes amid the biggest and deadliest Israeli escalation in the West Bank in decades and as Israel's far-right government pushes forward with plans to build new settler colonies and expand existing ones by stealing more West Bank lands from Palestinians.
On Monday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk pointed to the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) recent opinion that the Israeli occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end immediately as he implored the world to reject Israel's "blatant disregard for international law."
Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the ICJ for its conduct in the war on Gaza. According to the Gaza Health Ministry and U.N. agencies, Israel's 339-day assault on Gaza has left at least 145,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing while forcibly displacing, starving, and sickening millions more. More than 17,000 Palestinian children are believed to have been killed in Gaza.
"A healthy conscience can't simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children," said one human rights activist.
Warning: This story includes horrific images of death and destruction in Gaza, specifically photos of Palestinian children killed or wounded by Israeli attacks.
Israel's assault on Gaza has been described as the world's first live-streamed genocide, a testament to the abundance of haunting video and photographic evidence of the horrors inflicted on the Palestinian enclave over the past 11 months.
The images—of children with their limbs blown off by Israeli explosives, of despairing mothers holding their dead babies, of body after body unearthed from mass graves—are readily available, and at times seemingly unavoidable, for regular readers of major newspapers, users of social media platforms, and viewers of even corporate television outlets such as CNN.
It's safe to assume, then, that members of the United States Congress—a body that has helped arm and fund Israel's relentless war on Gaza—have seen many of the same photos and videos as much of the American public, a majority of which supports halting U.S. weapons sales to the Israeli government until the assault ends.
So why do so many U.S. lawmakers and political leaders—including President Joe Biden, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and Republican nominee Donald Trump—continue to back the war, despite readily available visual proof of the immense suffering it has caused?
"It's televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media," scholar and human rights activist Omar Suleiman wrote for Middle East Eye on Monday. "A healthy conscience can't simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children."
"The Gaza genocide is an American one," Suleiman added, "and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity in the type of war crimes they so often associate with historical hegemonic rivals."
Lara Al-Moubayed, a 1-year-old Palestinian baby killed in an Israeli bombardment, was brought to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza on September 8, 2024. (Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
This story features photographs taken in Gaza over roughly the past week, focusing specifically on the harms children and their loved ones are facing due to a military campaign that has no end in sight as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obstructs cease-fire talks.
According to the United Nations, most of those killed by Israel's 11-month assault on the Gaza Strip have been women and children—though no one has been spared.
In addition to the Israeli assault's catastrophic physical toll, the war has inflicted what one Gaza mother called "complete psychological destruction" on the enclave's children, an impact that will reverberate for generations.
Faced with evidence of large-scale Israeli atrocities, Republican lawmakers have opted to take explicitly genocidal postures while attempting to excuse Israeli war crimes by pointing to the appalling Hamas-led attack of October 7, which killed over 1,100 people.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told voters during a March event that the U.S. "shouldn't be spending a dime on humanitarian aid" for Gaza and that "it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima."
Asked by CodePink's Medea Benjamin in January whether he has "seen the pictures of all the babies being killed" in Gaza, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) responded, "These are not innocent Palestinian civilians."
[Warning: The following contains graphic images]
Wafaa Hamad, a girl who lost all her family members in an Israeli attack on their house, struggles to survive at Kemal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on September 3, 2024. (Photo by Khalil Ramzi Alkahlut/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Others, such as Biden and Harris, have paid lip service to the suffering of ordinary Gazans while refusing to support an arms embargo against Israel, a policy shift that advocates say is needed to pressure Israel's intransigent prime minister to accept a cease-fire and hostage-release deal.
"What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating," Harris said in March, prior to becoming the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential nominee.
During her address last month accepting the Democratic nomination, Harris used the passive voice to decry "what has happened in Gaza," saying "the scale of suffering is heartbreaking" as if it were caused by a natural disaster and not deliberate policy decisions by Israel and its chief ally and weapons supplier, the United States.
A view of the devastation at a mosque following Israeli attacks in Gaza City, Gaza on September 8, 2024. (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Not every U.S. lawmaker has ignored, brushed aside, or attempted to justify Israel's atrocities in Gaza.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the lone Palestinian American in Congress, implored her colleagues during an April speech to support a permanent cease-fire, pointing to "images of children in Gaza celebrating Eid on top of rubble of their homes, the schools, and masjids that no longer stand."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took to the Senate floor in June with photos of Palestinian children starving to death under Israel's siege, which has sparked famine conditions throughout the enclave.
"What kind of permanent damage will occur to virtually every one of these children?" Sanders asked.