Occupy Birmingham held a candle light vigil on Saturday, Jan. 7 at the Ward’s home in Center Point and about 50 people turned out (see video above). The city of Center Point is now reeling from the devastating affects of an F3 tornado that hit on the morning of Monday, Jan. 23, but the Ward home, just a couple of hundred feet from where the storm hit, was spared. Shortly after the vigil, Bank of America agreed to change the foreclosure sale date from the Jan. 26 to the March 29 and to consider a proposal for the Ward’s to obtain a new mortgage, according to Occupy Birmingham. If you want to help, you can sign an online petition here.
Occupy Birmingham protesters are planning a march and vigil Saturday January 14 at 6 p.m. on behalf of a family in Center Point that were the victim of real estate fraud by a sick and dying realtor. The group is to gather at 2608 2nd Place N.W.
Members of the group have been in negotiations with representatives for Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and report that the Ward family, seen in the video above, may get a hearing before being evicted.
“Many of the neighbors have told us they fear that their community is dying,” Melissa Vaughn said in a press release announcing the march and vigil. “We ask that Birmingham join us in standing up for the rights of people to keep their homes in the face of wrongful eviction.”
At Occupy protest encampments across the country this week, the controversy that was all the rage had to do with the defense budget bill just passed by Congress. The paranoia was palpable, and for good reason, considering how the issue was covered by the mainstream, corporate news media — and the implications for protesters worried about being arrested and detained indefinitely without due process as they carry their protests into an election year in 2012.
While much of the debate over the policy on detaining suspected terrorists on domestic soil was probably lost on much of the country now in a shopping frenzy with only a week to go before Christmas, even at the Occupy Birmingham encampment downtown activists were not happy with President Barack Obama. One even suggested he was taking a look at voting for Mitt Romney, the Mormon from Massachusetts, “because at least he represents a minority.”
It is a gorgeous fall Saturday morning as most of the people in my home state prepare for the Alabama-Auburn game, still referred to as the Iron Bowl only because no one has come up with a better name for it since it moved out of the iron city of Birmingham in 1989.
Everything takes awhile to change in the South, so give them time. It is amazing the game doesn’t already have a corporate name attached to it. Every other bowl game in America has been corporatized.
Is it possible that Occupy Wall Street might survive long enough to change our thinking on such things? I hope so, but I don’t have any faith.
Someone with a defeatist attitude accused me of having faith on the porch of the Hippie House the other day, while I was having a conversation (or a conversion) with Walter Simon of the Occupy Birmingham movement. I’m pretty sure I’ve explained this before, but over my morning coffee today, I feel the need to explain it again.
Concerned citizens are being asked to join with Occupy Birmingham and other civic and religious organizations Dec. 3 to stand up for civil and economic rights of Alabama and protest the state’s new repressive immigration law and its participation in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and deportation program.
Participants will gather in Gadsden at 12 p.m. and march to the Etowah County Detention Center, a privatized prison which houses a quota-based average of 325 undocumented immigrants on any given day. The Federal ICE program falls under Homeland Security and was billed as a way of detaining undocumented criminals, yet studies show that in some states 80 percent of those deported have committed no major crimes. In addition Alabama’s state law, H.B.56, encourages racial profiling, restricts employment, the use of public utilities and puts unnecessary strain on law enforcement resources.
“The economic cost to Alabama is only beginning to be estimated,” organizers said in a press release announcing the protest. “In taxes alone undocumented immigrants bring the state $130 million a year.”
The skies are grey. Rain’s on the way. It’s about time to take the canoe off the Chevy van for the winter and remove the futon mattress from the back too.
But I’m not quite ready for that. There must be one more useful trip in the works before the holidays take over the news and the weather turns ugly.
Oh, wait. Checking my Facebook events, it appears the Occupy Birmingham group is planning a road trip protest on Dec. 3 to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden where Alabama prison officials tend to hold all the alleged illegal immigrants before deporting them back to Central and South America. This might be a newsworthy trip.
The first I heard of the place was in an interview I did with Democratic Party chair Mark Kennedy recently at the AFL-CIO convention near Montgomery. In case you missed it, he referred to the place as a “gulag,” named after Gulag the government agency in Russia that administered Soviet forced labor camps.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
