By Caroline Lewis

A “postmodern grassroots variety show” may sound like just another one of the dismissive names people have been lobbing at Occupy ever since it cropped up in Zuccotti Park last September. But that’s what activist Laura Hanna promises in the fundraising extravaganza the Occupy group Strike Debt is putting on tonight at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village.

"The art collective Not an Alternative sets up giant props they made for the event. Photo by Caroline Lewis

For some, this will be a quirky variety show, but for alternative music and comedy fans, this will be a star-studded event. Comedians like Janeane Garofolo and David Rees will entertain along with members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Das Racist (OK, there will be magicians, jugglers, and real live Occupiers as well).

What brings them all together? It’s the kickoff of the Rolling Jubilee. The Rolling Jubilee is an ongoing “project of Strike Debt that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it,” explains the group’s website.

And thanks to some very kind words from mainstream commentators hailing from all over the political spectrum, the group far surpassed their goal for tonight’s fundraiser before it even started.

“Whoa, did you see that?” asked Annie Spencer, a member of Strike Debt. “The live ticker on the Rolling Jubilee website just crossed $200,000 being raised.” That’s enough to buy and abolish more than $4 million worth of debt.

Praises being sung of the Rolling Jubilee are rightly qualified by the observation that this is a nice thought, but probably won’t make a dent in America’s $11 trillion of debt. In fact, the group can’t even promise to erase an entire family’s debt.

“This first debt purchase of over $100,000 of medical debt is roughly 80 different people,” said Thomas Gokey, who helped execute the group’s successful test run.

Gokey said that certain kinds of debt, like mortgage debt and student debt, are also more difficult to erase. “As we learn more about the industry and talk to more people with expertise who are willing to help us, we may learn that there are additional things possible.”

But if nothing else, the Rolling Jubilee is educating people about the rules of the debt game by letting them join in.

The fundraiser will be interactive as well. “I think what makes us different is we don’t actually have telephones that are ringing in,” said Hanna. “But we have a social media booth that we’re going to set up so we can interact with people who are watching the LiveStream.”

You can learn more about debt and the Rolling Jubilee by checking out the resources on their website or watching the LiveStream of tonight’s fundraiser, which will be complete with “speed lectures” on a variety of debt-related issues. And jugglers – don’t forget the jugglers.

By Paul Bisceglio

With Occupy Wall Street’s one-year anniversary celebration in the Financial District scheduled for Sept. 17, New York city officials are wondering if OWS protestors might have anything else in the works to commemorate their inaugural occupation of Zuccotti Park.

Another takeover, perhaps?

Michael Levine, professor of urban planning at Pace University and director of planning for Community Board 1, doesn’t know when the next wave of public advocacy groups will move in, but he can say where in lower Manhattan the occupation is most likely to occur.

Levine recently challenged his students to venture out into the city to find its most vulnerable Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS), publicly accessible outdoor plazas that, like Zuccotti Park, are owned by commercial companies, not the city.

POPS have been ubiquitous in Manhattan sincea 1961 zoning resolution introduced a program that allowed developers to construct taller buildings if their plans included outdoor plazas. They tend to be more occupation-friendly than city-owned parks because some are open 24/7, don’t display concrete rules and regulations and are owned by the large businesses that public advocacy groups oppose.

Levine’s students rated 28 POPS south of Canal Street on a scale of 0 to 4, from invulnerable to highly vulnerable. They based their rating on four categories: convenience, size, signage or lack thereof and reputation of owner. The following three plazas scored over 3.0, making them the top of the POPS—the three privately owned public spaces in lower Manhattan most vulnerable to occupation.

140 Broadway
Owner: HSBC
Area: 3,347 square feet
Score: 3.1
Student Nellyn Caraballo gave this plaza across from Zuccotti Park major points for its high-traffic location along Broadway and its big-time corporate owners, but noted that it is too small and busy for group occupancy—plus the owners have been clever enough to post a sign prohibiting camping.

388 Greenwich St.
Owner: Salomon Smith Barney
Area: 51,635 square feet
Score: 3.2
A huge, visible area with benches, grass and trees makes this Tribeca park ideal for group gatherings, according to student Arlida Bucaj, and the park’s corporate owners make it all the more enticing. The location lost points for clear signage, though nothing is posted to prohibit sleeping.

59 Maiden Lane
Owner: Amtrust Realty Corporation
Area: 32,604 square feet
Score: 3.5
This capacious plaza surrounds part of the New York City Finance Department at the intersection of Maiden Lane and William Street. The plaza scored big on size, absent signage and its suit-wearing owner. The majority of the plaza is open concrete, however, with scatterings of trees and benches on the ends, so student Erin Hanraty deducted points for convenience and comfort. The plaza might be a great place for gathering, but protestors had better be sure to bring some chairs and padding, as well as watch out for trampling commuters.

New York City journalist and author Thai Jones is keenly aware of this fact as he specializes in researching and writing about radical political movements from the 20th century. His latest book, More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives and New York’s Year of Anarchy, serves to propel Jones’ body of work forward as it chronicles a city perilously close to chaos in 1914 just as the country was inching toward World War I.

Moreover, Jones, a former reporter for Newsday and the Albany Times-Union, brings a measure of personal experience on writing about radical political movements as the son of former members of the Weather Underground, a 1960s communist revolutionary group that carried out a campaign of bombing public buildings in protest of the Vietnam War.

In 1970, associates of Jones’ parents were killed in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion as members of the Weather Underground were preparing nail bombs to be used later at a New York City social gathering frequented by soldiers.

Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education from the University of Illinois in Chicago, is best known for his work in urban educational reform as well as his late-’60s and early-’70s political and antiwar activism when he co-founded the Weather Underground movement. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ayers found himself at the center of a controversy stemming from his contacts with then-political candidate Barack Obama.

Today, May 3, NYC’s Tenement Museum will provide a fitting backdrop for Jones as he joins with Ayers to discuss his book, politics, research and how Ayers’ firsthand political activism and radicalism intersects with Jones’ researched history of the left.

Our Town Downtown caught up with both Jones and Ayers to find out more about More Powerful Than Dynamite and the upcoming talk at the Tenement Museum.

OTDT: What compelled you to write More Powerful now? Was it the OWS movement?

TJ: Actually, this project was years in the making and I submitted the final draft to the publisher in June. The Occupy Movement began in New York City in September, so the parallels are entirely fortuitous. As soon as the protests began I tried to be on hand whenever I could. For me, going down to Liberty Square and joining the demonstrations as a participant—and also as an observer—was an incredibly moving and inspirational experience. Every day down there was equivalent to a month of research.

OTDT: Do you see any similarities between the conditions in 1914 NYC and today’s OWS?

BA: The portrait of New York City, 1914, that Thai Jones paints so skillfully brings the parallels with conditions today into sharp focus. … The deepest parallel I registered was the complex humanity of each person swimming through a dynamic history in-the-making, building an identity without guarantees—just like each of us.

OTDT: Do you support the OWS protesters? What parallels do you see between OWS and the Weather Underground?

BA: Yes, yes, yes.

Occupy is an invitation and an opening, not a point of arrival, and it’s already won in important ways: the 1 percent is exposed, the frame is changed, and the 99 percent are getting mobilized against war and planetary destruction, for peace and simple fairness.

Occupy is recreating the public square as a place where every grievance and every aspiration can find space to breathe, and it’s a metaphor being applied everywhere as activists fight for public education, workers’ rights, health care, peace, prison abolition and housing.

OTDT: What impact did your parents’ going into hiding for a decade have on you? What did you think, at the time, about what they were doing regarding involvement with the Weather Underground?

TJ: I was 4 years old when the FBI beat down the door of our apartment in the Bronx and took my parents to jail—in the end, they did not have to serve any time. My father received community service and parole, and the charges against my mother were dropped. So I didn’t have any concrete feelings about their activities at the time. All I knew was that we had some secrets that weren’t to be discussed, and that every so often my name would change.

OTDT: What are your thoughts on our recent involvement in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan? Were we/are we justified being in either country?

BA: Those invasions have been predictably catastrophic, both for the people of those lands who are suffering death and dislocation and destruction and who have opposed the U.S. presence in huge, super-majority numbers, and to the people of the U.S. who have seen the decimation of civil liberties, the wanton waste of resources, and the coarsening of our social lives.

OTDT: What will the talk/event at Tenement Museum focus on?

BA: I’d like to talk politics and research with this brilliant young social historian, but I also would love to dive into a discussion of writing, and the discipline of the desk. This is an elegantly crafted work—Dickensian in its drive and scope—and I’m interested in his thinking about the writerly challenges and choices he faced, and how, finally, he did it.

OTDT: What advice would you give to today’s OWS protesters?

BA: Fundamental radical change is what we need now more than ever—we need to change ourselves, we need to remake the world. We need a revolution in values—against militarism, racism, materialism, consumerism—and a revolution in fact—for peace and sharing the socially produced wealth and saving the planet. There is no single answer, but refusal to go along with exploitation, oppression, conquest and greed opens the path.

Thai Jones will speak with Bill Ayers on May 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 103 Orchard St. (betw. Delancey & Broome Sts.). For more information, call 212.982.8420 or visit tenement.org.

Photo Courtesy of Dave Winer

Two cops were injured Saturday night after a clash between the NYPD and a group of pipe wielding anarchists amidst an hours-long clash with officers. According to police, a group of approximately 25 individuals tried to smash the windows of the Starbucks on Astor Place using 8-foot metal pipes at 8:45 p.m.

The protestors had recently left the fifth annual Anarchist Book Fair at Judson Church on Washington Square South. There, a separate larger group of around 150 people had vandalized commercial property and overturned garbage cans in the area. Responding officers were pelted with pipes and bottles while chanting “f*** the NYPD,” and “all pigs must die.”

Clashes between anarchists and the police are nothing new in New York City. While recent scuffles with Occupy Wall Street protestors come to mind, this conflict has been steadily churning under the city for more than a century. The first commissioner of the NYPD, Michael C. Murphy, commanded all precincts to secretly find and record the names of anarchists and their meeting places.

“I don’t propose, if I can help it, to have any Anarchists living in this city,” Murphy stated in the Sept. 11 1901 issue of The New York Times.

During the spring of 1919, Galleanist anarchists mailed bombs to prominent politicians and appointees who they viewed as enemies of the working class. Included among the would-be victims were then-mayor John Hylan and his police commissioner Richard Enright. More recently, there were clashes between NYPD and self purported anarchists in the East Village. In 1988, nine protestors were arrested after throwing bottles and ramming a police barricade into a new luxury condo on Ave. B side of Tompkins Square after the NYPD tried to impose a 1 a.m. curfew. Scores were injured in the melee, with dozens of complaints of police brutality being reported.  Several years later, after anarchists were pushed out of Tompkins Square, another group clashed with residents and police at La Plaza Cultural on E 9th St.and Ave. C. Anarchists came out to party during a hot Sept. evening and the drunken revelers trashed the gardens and demolished fences.