http://www.buffalogreencode.com/
We’re preparing a new zoning ordinance to shape Buffalo’s future. It’s designed to build on the land use plan that was developed last year, and to make our shared vision for the city a reality.

The zoning ordinance contains the specific and detailed laws that will govern development in our city. Please join us at an upcoming Open House to learn more about how this will benefit your neighborhood and let us know what you think.

Plan to attend the open house where you live or work – June 4-9.

The slow-turning gears of justice have begun to grind the Hancock 33 --including the Buffalo-7 subgroup of those wonderful individuals. On April 22, they were arrested and zip-tied while journeying to inform uninformed uniformed people of their Constitutional obligation to refuse to follow illegal orders related to our per-Magna Charta extrajudicial execution of human beings by unmanned aerial vehicles (drones).

Bad news, but there is a silver lining in these unwarranted arrests: the anti-drone signs shown for several years at the bimonthly vigil at Hancock Field in Mattydale NY seem to be having an effect. For the past 2 years, the Onondaga Sheriff's Department acted as though they couldn't have cared less about the wording on the signs. Now, the sheriff's behavior changed suddenly and dramatically -- for mysterious reasons. Two weeks ago, the Onondaga Sheriff's Office dusted off a law about parading or assembling in a public space without a permit and arrested and zip-tied 33 members of the coalition for parading and assembling without a permit. And Tuesday, May 2, two more drone vigil people were arrested holding signs while standing on the side of a very public highway. The latest arrests were evoked by a
complaint filed by the military -- suggesting someone high up the command ladder is upset by the bimonthly transmission of unwanted visual information reaching successfully inside the air base, as well as reaching those exiting the base during a change in shift. Perhaps it's reaching the drone pilots and the folks who fire the missiles -- the very people who see very clearly the horrific results of their day's work. Perhaps they are having second thoughts...and those thoughts see expression in the form of new behavior by the Onondaga Sheriff's Office.

For now, no more than two people at one time can hold anti-drone signs outside the main gate of Hancock Air Field -- so says the Onondaga Sheriff's Office (see David Swanson, WarIsACrime.org). In Mattydale NY, no more two people standing near a military base can exercise their First Amendment Rights simultaneously.

Can the U.S. military use civilian police to limit the expression of First Amendment Rights on non-military property?

Unlike last years' judicial events --- where everyone was conveniently arraigned in a few evenings --- the arraignment dates for the 33 heroes are spread out over 2 months. This has the effect of maximizing the traveling expenses for folks living far from Syracuse...including the Buffalo-7 -- and diminishing the already nano-desire of mainstream media to cover the Hancock 33 trials. Nevertheless, the WNY Peace Center will proudly pay the peripatetic Buffalo-7's expenses, and our newly formed WNY Peace Center Media Group will play a big role in getting the word out about the Hancock 33 trials.

Russell Brown, member of the WNY Peace Center and Chair of the Militarismand Resistance Task Force, was arraigned May 1 in DeWitt Town court. Judge Gideon ordered a pre-trial hearing for Russell on June 14. He will be going back to court at least twice more.

DeWitt Town Court schedules will force members of the Buffalo-7 to make at least 18 round trips between Buffalo and Syracuse over the next two or three months (arraignment, pre-trial hearing and trial).
On Wednesday, May 9, two members of Occupy Buffalo -- Laura Toth and Jose Verduzco -- will be arraigned in DeWitt Town Court. We need a volunteer to drive them to court, witness the proceedings, and bring them home that evening. Unlike Russell's arraignment this week -- where 22 members of the Upstate NY Drone Coalition showed up in support -- no Hancock 33er from Syracuse, Rochester, Ithaca or Binghamton will be in court that night.....so someone from the WNY Peace Center has to step up and make sure Laura and Jose are not alone at their arraignment:

Wednesday, May 9, 2012
6 P.M.
DeWitt Town Court
5400 Butternut Dr.
East Syracuse, New York 13057-8509

If interested, please call the WNY Peace Center at 332-3904 and leave a message.

Source Link: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

"This document focuses on the "Top 1%" as a whole because that's been the traditional cut-off point for "the top" in academic studies, and because it's easy for us to keep in mind that we are talking about one in a hundred. But it is also important to realize that the lower half of that top 1% has far less than those in the top half; in fact, both wealth and income are super-concentrated in the top 0.1%, which is just one in a thousand."

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Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, discusses the impact on the war on terror on average Americans. Post 9/11 programs such as the Patriot Act and other surveillance provisions have reversed the balance of power between the government and the people, allowing the government to abuse this power. The government now swims in a ocean of public data to which it has no desire to return back.

Workers with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America have occupied Serious Materials (formerly Republic Window & Door) in Chicago. The company had said it is closing operations at its Chicago plant due to "ongoing economic challenges in construction and building products, collapse in demand for window products, difficulty in obtaining favorable lease terms, high leasing and utility costs and taxes, and a range of other factors unrelated to labor costs[...]"

http://libcom.org/news/workers-occupy-factory-chicago-24022012

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Rep. Yasmin Neal of the George House of Representative Introduced a bill today that would bring a small degree of equality to the debate over reproductive rights.

A college student’s first protest takes him directly into the big leagues

By Connor Miller

The Occupy Wall Street movement and subsequent protests that are continuing across the United States have drawn world-wide attention. Our correspondent, a college freshman, participates in the first demonstration of his life. Here is his point-of-view of Occupy Wall Street.

Before I went to Occupy Wall Street, I did some research to see what I was protesting. I went to Occupywallst.org which told me the time and location of the occupation, but not much more. “The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” claimed the site. I felt like I could buy into this cause, so I got a couple of people from my college dorm just outside New York City come with me to Manhattan in the tradition of protesting college students.
. We were going to go down in history, just like the kids from the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Paris spring of 1968, and Tiananmen Square. Hopefully not just like Tiananmen Square.

Go "here" to the Facebook group for the WNY bus.

All of us have a reason to go to New York City on September 17th: to occupy Wall Street. As of October 2008, over two million quality jobs were outsourced between 2004 and now; racial economic disparities mirrored policing disparities; as of 2001 we have a 700 plus strong (and expensive) network of military bases and a Global War on Terror; and pollution has firmly established itself as a cause of disease among poor communities. This one action will not resolve all of these problems at once yet, like Egypt it will be a political breakthrough moment, or like in Spain tens of thousands of citizens did begin a direct-democratic process to build a new movement for social justice. Where the earlier alter-globalization (a.k.a. anti-globalization) movement left off, we will pick up the slack with a flourishing new movement of movements.

The demands are numerous and over reddit, facebook, twitter, and via email, activists and disenfranchised people are having a virtual assembly 24 hours a day to cite each abuse of this economic system. In this conversation, every progressive measure that is neccesarry to fix our county- and our world is on the table: ending corporate personhood, community control of localized economies, collecting corporate back taxes, community banking, progressive taxation, and a new deal-style stimulus plan.