Allison Kilkenny | The Nation

Hurricane Sandy, the unprecedented superstorm that ravaged the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States, left large swaths of New York City destroyed and ultimately killed 109 people in the US alone. In addition to experiencing trauma and shock, many resident now express frustration with lagging federal aid and assistance from other aid agencies like the Red Cross.

Vincent Ignizio, a New York City Councilman representing Staten Island’s 51st District, blames the gas shortage for hurting the recovery effort. Five-hour-long waits for gas have resulted in citizens’ being highly frugal with their commutes, and may be hindering aid, according to Ignizio.

“People who want to volunteer…are stymied from doing so,” he said.

And while the Defense Department recently dispatched 24 million gallons of fuel to the region, many citizens haven’t seen the military, or the Red Cross, since the storm hit. While FEMA workers were spotted recently in Staten Island, other citizens have received help from an entirely separate source: Occupy Wall Street.

Though numerous obituaries have been written about Occupy, the movement experienced a spike in activity in Sandy’s wake. Occupy Sandy, as the effort has been branded, arose quickly in the aftermath of the storm, setting up local community hubs to dispense water, food and aid, and form groups to help communities pump water from their houses and clean up the vast quantities of rubble left in Sandy’s wake. Distribution centers and volunteer hubs are now located in Sunset Park, Astoria, Brighton Beach, DUMBO, East Village, Lower East Side, Jersey City, Red Hook, Rockaway, and Staten Island. (photo of volunteer hub by Sarah Jaffe)

While federal mobilization efforts can often take weeks—sometimes months—to reach citizens, Occupy was one of the only local groups capable of quickly mobilizing to help victims. Organizing volunteers and supplies is no small task, but Occupy Sandy has been able to generate a large amount of aid. On Sunday, Michael Premo, one of the volunteers, estimated the mobilization effort included 2,500 volunteers, 15,000 meals and 120 carloads of supplies sent to recovery sites.

Understandably, residents were extremely grateful to receive any help they could get, but storm-ravaged communities weren’t the only recipients glad to see the sometimes-villainized occupiers. In a truly bizarre moment (especially to observers of the NYPD’s violent suppression of Occupy during its time at Zuccotti), FEMA and NYPD officers joined in chanting “We are unstoppable, another world is possible” with Occupy Sandy volunteers helping at Far Rockaway.

Lopi LaRoe, an Occupy Sandy volunteer helping with the recovery efforts in Far Rockaway and Staten Island, described the scene in the aftermath of the storm as being one of total devastation.

“It was decimated and really intense to see,” said LaRoe. “There’s literally a huge swath of area that’s burnt and destroyed.”

LaRoe, who said she hasn’t seen a single Red Cross worker during her time as a volunteer, described a makeshift, bustling community center that emerged in the aftermath. The Red Cross complaint isn’t an anomaly. Both volunteers and storm victims have complained about the missing familiar red roods, and have a habit of speaking about the Red Cross as though they’re phantoms. “I heard they’re out on Staten Island, but I haven’t seen them yet…”

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

The Red Cross responded to a press inquiry about the ongoing aid effort, stating their organization has helped people in “ten states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico affected by Sandy,” and has served more than 481,000 meals and snacks, provided more than 12,000 health services and emotional support contacts, handed out more than 33,000 relief items, and the entire Cross fleet of response vehicles—“more than 320 in total”—has been activated to distribute meals, water, snacks, and relief supplies.

But it’s clear there’s been interruption and/or inefficiency in disseminating services and aid workers. Grassroots volunteers and NYC residents have complained about the lack of Red Cross workers, and other aid agencies, on the ground.

LaRoe said she saw one military vehicle, the NYFD, and NYPD officers, but mainly in a crowd control capacity, i.e., guarding gas stations during the painfully long waits. However, C.S. Muncy, an independent photojournalist, disputed that take on events when he reported riding around with the Army Guard on Friday in Long Beach, where they were handing out food and water, pulling cars out of the sand, helping clean up debris and patrolling for looters.

Meanwhile, Occupy continues to dutifully help storm-ravaged communities.

“People were sorting donations, feeding hungry people, local residents lining up to get things they need,” LaRoe said, adding that residents seemed thankful and relieved that anyone was willing to help them.

“People are traumatized out there. They’ve come through some really intense stuff. They’ve lost their homes, some of them lost family members and pets, and they’re really emotional, and they want to tell their stories. The aid we were giving was largely material aid, but now we’re moving into trauma support, and setting up places where people can tell their stories.”

In Far Rockaway, teams are also helping people pump out water from their basements.

Volunteer Sofía Gallisá Muriente has been working in the Rockaway relief effort throughout the week, and describes a world—like in pre-storm NYC —divided by class. Certain areas have been able to slowly recover by hiring companies to clean away rubbish and pump water from basements, but their poor neighbors have had to rely on charity and loaned equipment from aid groups like Occupy Sandy.

“There’s a clear division of wealth. There’s a real segregation of wealth between the big summer homes and the poorer areas with public housing projects,” said Muriente. “In the wealthier areas, people have been able to hire help to come pump out their basement, remove the debris, remove the trees from the streets and cut them up, whereas in the poorer areas, what you see is people trying to clean up their own homes, but without access to clean water and cleaning supplies. Some of them have lost a lot of things, especially in the basements, and the people living in the basements lost it all.”

Iwan Baan, a Dutch photograph who captured the now iconic photograph of a post-Sandy Manhattan for New York magazine, echoed these sentiments when describing the image.

“It was the only way to show that New York was two cities, almost,” Baan said. “One was almost like a third world country where everything was becoming scarce. Everything was complicated. And then another was a completely vibrant, alive New York.”

Baan continued:

“What really struck me, if you look at the image on the left, you see the Goldman Sachs building and new World Trade Center. These two buildings are brightly lit. And then the rest of New York looks literally kind of powerless. In a way, it shows also what’s wrong with the country in this moment.”

In tall public housing complexes, loss of power means elevators don’t work and residents don’t have access to clean water, so there are many people—especially seniors— trapped inside their homes. Others, Muriente added, are afraid to leave their apartments due to fears of looters and/or confusion about where they’re supposed to go for help.

Like LaRoe, Muriente has not seen any Red Cross workers, or any other aid outside of Occupy Sandy, in the parts of Rockaway she’s been stationed at.

“A lot of people have made it very clear we’re the only ones helping them out,” said Muriente. “They say they haven’t received any help from FEMA or the Red Cross. I haven’t seen the Red Cross. I’ve seen the National Guard, but I haven’t seen them distributing anything. I’ve just seen them patrolling, and the only supplies I’ve seen the National Guard give away are the things they gave away to us. Two nights ago, they pulled over and gave us a truck full of water and meals, which really startled all of us because it means they recognize we have things under control in a more efficient way than they do. It legitimizes the whole thing we’ve been doing.” (photo by Nick Pinto)

Diego Ibanez, an Occupy Sandy volunteer, confirmed Muriente’s version of events.

“The National Guard came to us and said you guys are way more organized than we are. They’re giving us stuff to hand out. We got over six hubs or collectives. Every twenty blocks, we have a new spot that we’re trying to engage with the community at. We’re not the Red Cross. We’re not FEMA, so it’s different. It’s grassroots. It’s guerilla-style. It’s a different kind of struggle, but we’re trying,” said Ibanez.

Muriente also reported seeing Homeland Security patrolling neighborhoods, and told me she witnessed armed Homeland Security personnel in military gear, bulletproof vests and holding long rifles, pull over three young black men in the middle of the dark Rockaway as they walked down the street.

“They basically pulled a stop-and-frisk in the middle of blackout, made them put their hands up, started patting them down, pulling out flashlights from their pockets, and when we confronted them about it, [Homeland Security personnel] said there had been looting,” she said. “That’s the only time I’ve seen a government official outside of a vehicle that whole day.”

Muriente added that Doctors Without Borders went to city officials to volunteer their expertise, and they were told they weren’t needed, so then they came to Occupy Sandy, who connected them with the Rockaway Youth Task Force and connected them with on-the-ground volunteers so they could go door-to-door and offer their assistance. (photo by Gideon Oliver)

“The other day, I had around five city officials from different emergency services taking down notes and asking me questions. It was unreal that I was telling them what was happening out there. It was completely ridiculous that they had no idea where what was, what was being done, where they could go, who was giving out aid. They’re totally lost,” Muriente said.

LaRoe, who has been with Occupy Wall Street since the beginning of the movement, described what’s happening now with the Occupy Sandy relief effort as “the opposite of a brain drain.”

“All of the best organizers from around the country have come to New York City [for Occupy], and a lot of them have stayed since last fall, and now we’ve all got our chops and we’ve got this great network set up, so now it’s like Occupy 2.0,” she said. “We’re able to use all the skills we’ve learned in the last year and put it into use here in an amazing way. To me, it’s like Occupy coming of age.”

LaRoe sees the Occupy Sandy effort extending beyond disaster relief, and believes this model could result in the creation of community hubs in order to empower individuals at a local level, allowing them to problem solve issues like the lack of affordable fresh produce in poor areas.

“We’re hoping to set up sustainable hubs where people in the community can go learn skills,” said LaRoe, adding that Occupy doesn’t want to fall into a disaster-relief cycle, where “aid” is strictly defined as handing out bottles of water and prepackaged food whenever the next super storm hits. “That’s disempowering,” said LaRoe. “We want to empower people to work within their communities to solve problems that they’re facing.”

Put another way: Occupy believes what’s needed post-Sandy is solidarity, not charity. Charity implies an almost superficial, short-term Band-Aid solution when what’s really needed is a serious long-term effort to bring communities together, not just during the month-long frenzy inspired by a disaster, but all the time in order to develop solutions that work for everyone instead of just the 1 percent.

This is the point SUNY disaster historian Jacob Remes, author of the forthcoming book Disaster Citizenship: Urban Disasters and the Formation of the North American Progressive State, recently made to journalist Josh Eidelson:

“The best disaster relief is offered through solidarity, horizontally, through organizations that people are already members of. Sometimes that’s government. Often it’s not. Neoliberalism tries to dismantle government, but at the same time it creates this dynamic where all of the private interactions we have are economic exchanges. And that’s just as bad, especially in disaster relief.”

Remes’ proposed solution:

“I might sound like a family-values Republican here, but churches, unions — in the past, fraternal orders. Really any organization where people come together and build ties of solidarity on a regular basis can expand to doing this on an emergency basis. So we see Occupy Wall Street gearing up and doing a lot of disaster relief.”

Of course, there are always complaints about the recovery effort during the chaotic aftermath of a storm like Sandy. I’m offering the following testimony not to reflect negatively upon the entire Occupy Sandy effort, but rather to show there is significant problem with the entire temporary charity model LaRoe described, and to demonstrate that grassroots relief efforts sometimes fall into the same inefficiency trap national aid programs have been criticized over:

One volunteer named Kate Barrow complained about a relief station she volunteered at with a four-hour wait line for supplies and food. When she and her friends attempted to distribute supplies on the street, their efforts were thwarted by supervisors, who cautioned the crowd might “get out of control.”

“Because feeding people starts riots, apparently,” Kate wrote, clearly frustrated with the relief effort (Kate didn’t mention what group she volunteered to help).

Hers is not the first complaint I’ve heard/read from volunteers with the relief effort. It’s all too easy for a hub to be hijacked by small groups of people who harbor prejudices that corrupt otherwise nobel efforts.

“There were way too many racial microaggressions from the predominately white volunteers toward people of color coming from the community,” Kate wrote. “The most common was the assumption that people of color from the community weren’t volunteers, but trying to cut in line or sneak extra food or supplies, and an underlying tone that poor folks needed to be controlled or else total chaos would ensue.”

Nick Pinto, a staff writer at The Village Voice, tweeted about a similar experience at an Occupy Sandy set up at B113 Street.

“The relief response is incredibly disorganized,” Pinto tweeted. “The human response and mutual aid is inspiring. But at the same time, it is deeply disheartening to see the efficiency and replication.”

While Pinto was simply reporting the facts on the ground, it’s likely the chaos at these hubs may earn Occupy a certain degree of criticism, but such critiques would be somewhat misguided, and similar to the backlash the group received for its attempts to feed the homeless at Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011. At the time, certain media outlets bemoaned the fact that the homeless were flocking to Zuccotti once they learned of the promise of a hot meal, instead of, say, critiquing the state that permits individuals to go hungry.

What’s happening now on the ground is a patchwork recovery effort. Different organizations and aid groups are scrambling to join forces and find the most effective ways to get aid to storm victims, but the process of trying to achieve that goal can sometimes be chaotic. Muriente hasn’t seen the four-hour wait lines described by Kate, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist elsewhere.

“I haven’t seen it, but I haven’t been everywhere,” said Muriente. “What I see, for the most part, in the Rockaways, are different grassroots organizations that are handling different sites. We’re collaborating with a bunch of different organizations. There’s spaces like the one on 113th Street where Occupy Sandy is the bottom line and the guiding force, but there’s other sites where other organizations started doing the work and we’re just there to support them, providing additional resources. Everyone is doing things differently. There’s no one set formula.”

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

Grassroots aid efforts like Occupy Sandy aren’t perfect, but when FEMA and the Red Cross and the NYPD and the military fail to bring comfort and assistance to the communities of New York, Occupy attempted to fill the void, and for that, they should be commended.

Occupy Sandy has posted a list of volunteer locations and drop-off points.

How to help the recovery effort in Far Rockaway.

During the presidential debates, President Obama and Mitt Romney successfully avoided (with an assist from the debate moderators) addressing several prominent issues, including climate change, gun control, drone strikes, poverty and the housing crisis.

While the candidates occasionally discussed these gravely important issues in an indirect way—Obama mentioned “folks who are striving to get into the middle class,” Mitt Romney paid homage to the poor by promising to make the social safety net “more efficient,” i.e., privatize it, and Obama paid his usual lip service to wind and solar energy—the candidates were largely able to skirt and parry actually confronting these issues in any meaningful way.

In fact, during the last debate on foreign policy, which on more than one occasion strayed into the domestic policy arena, the candidates agreed on several issues: Iran is the greatest threat ever known to the planet, drone strikes are necessary and tools for peace, the United States would back Israel if it were attacked and China is abusing trade. Afterwards, in discussing the last debate, MSNBC host Chris Hayes noted that there was very little substantive disagreement between the candidates.

And while Obama occasionally strayed into domestic territory and talked about rebuilding US infrastructure, missing from the debate was any real conversation about poverty and the ongoing housing crisis. The candidates prioritized the subjects in this fashion, even during the prior debates, despite the fact that in recent polls the economy and unemployment rank as the issues most important to Americans—not Iran’s “spinning uranium,” as Romney puts it.

ABC’s Jordan Fabian noted the conspicuous lack of discussion on the housing crisis, stating housing policy must be “less sexy” than Iran or the “47 percent.”

“It’s…a really complicated subject and neither candidate has a strong plan of how they would go forward, so they would prefer not to talk about it,” said Janis Bowdler, director of the Wealth Building Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights group.

NCLR recently sponsored an effort to drop off more than 30,000 postcards at the Obama and Romney campaign headquarters on Tuesday asking each to explain their housing plan. Part of the problem, however, is that popular support doesn’t have any impact on the debates themselves. Every minute detail of the questions and audience members is groomed, edited and censored by both campaign staffs to the point where there’s absolutely no chance of an audience member asking a tough, surprising question, protesters getting the ear of the candidates or anything else remotely interesting happening.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis is still very real and affecting millions of Americans. As ABC notes, Obama’s 2009 housing plan, which he said would “help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can afford—avoid foreclosures,” actually fell dramatically short of that goal, only helping around 1 million homeowners receive permanent modifications on their mortgages, just one-quarter of those who applied for help.

Bowdler calls Obama’s mortgage modification and refinancing program the administration’s “Achilles heel.”

Romney’s plan has been criticized for lacking fundamental details, much like the rest of his economic plan.

“The major question is: how do they envision housing as a part of our economic recovery and growth in the future. And if they do, then what are you going to do about it?” Bowdler said. “We haven’t even gotten the candidates to say that much.”

Ana Casas Wilson is one of the Americans currently struggling to stay in her home. In April, Wilson, along with at least eighty supporters, attempted to deliver her mortgage payment directly to Tim Sloan, the top financial officer for Wells Fargo, which is servicing Wilson’s loan). She was arrested for her trouble.

Wilson lives in her childhood home with her husband James, a school employee, and her mother, who is a retired factor worker who now works as a home care worker. In addition to having stage-four breast cancer, Wilson suffers from cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair.

Most recently, she has informed Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca that she will refuse to leave her home if his deputies try to evict her.

“This is Breast Cancer Awareness Month,” said Wilson, who missed making a mortgage payment when she was in the hospital undergoing treatment for her breast cancer. “I can’t believe that Wells Fargo, US Bank and Sheriff Baca would take my family’s home away because I was ill and in the hospital.”

Like in many eviction cases, and perhaps the most absurd reality of the housing crisis, Wilson’s family is trying to work with the bank to continue giving them money. Wilson and her supporters have been trying to reach Wells Fargo and US Bank to find out why the banks are so keen to throw out a family fully capable and willing to make mortgage payments.

In 2009, Wilson was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. Her husband quit his night job as a security guard—and reduced the family’s income—to tend to her. While Wilson was in the hospital and undergoing chemotherapy, the family fell behind on its mortgage payments and Wells Fargo started to foreclose on their property.

Once the family’s financial situation stabilized, they repeatedly attempted to renegotiate their mortgage with Wells Fargo, but the bank eventually began rejecting their payments and foreclosed.

According to the most recent estimates, around 15 million homeowners are “underwater,” and while many economists agree that the most effective solution would be for the federal government to require banks to renegotiate mortgages (both for the homeowners and the banks—why pass up payments for an empty house no one is going to buy?), the issue of the housing crisis has been consistently ignored in the debates.

To be sure, 15 million Americans would have much rather heard the candidates’ ideas for easing the housing crisis than they did hearing bizarre theories about spinning uranium.

For more on the fight to save American homes from foreclosure, check out Allison Kilkenny’s coverage of the Occupy Our Homes movement in Atlanta.

In addition to being entirely shut out of this year’s presidential debates, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested for “blocking traffic” as they attempted to enter the debate at Hofstra University. The women were detained despite the fact that in the video of the arrests the police are much more of an impediment on traffic than the two candidates.

Stein and Honkala have been shut out, despite the fact that the Green Party ticket will be on an estimated 85 percent of ballots this election. The Commission on Presidential Debates stipulates that a candidate must garner at least 15 percent in national polls in order to participate, but national television exposure is a key factor in generating that kind of broad support. Hence, shutting out third-party candidates creates a cyclical suppression in which candidates can’t reach the 15 percent mark precisely because they are denied access to a large audience.

Additionally, there are all kinds of hurdles placed in third-party candidate’s paths as they attempt to collect signatures and support. Ralph Nader was famously kicked off the Oregon ballot in 2004 by the state Supreme Court for “fraud” and “circulator irregularities,” despite the fact that he submitted far more county-verified voter signatures than the 15,306 needed on sheets in full compliance will all statues and all written rules. And that’s only one example of numerous cases of third-party suppression.

Shutting out third-party candidates from debates obviously inflicts damage on the democratic process, but it also waters down the debate. Stein would have been a valuable asset to the dialogue, particularly when 20-year-old Jeremy Epstein posed a question about the bleak future for soon-to-be-graduates.

Here is Stein talking to Forbes’s Peter J. Reilly about her fears for a generation that is being crushed by overwhelming student debt, and how she would prefer we bail out students rather than banks.

Stein would have been the only candidate to propose holding the banks accountable for the systemic fraud that led to the 2008 subprime disaster. President Obama and Governor Romney, having embraced the “look forward, not backward” mantra, refer only to the “tough economic times” in passing, as though it was some terrible bygone era that will never be repeated. In reality, a disastrous bubble-burst will definitely happen again without oversight, regulation and prosecutions of guilty Wall Street firms, and Stein is the only somewhat prominent candidate proposing that.

Stein would have also been the only candidate to propose significantly scaling back on military and security spending, and drone strikes, which have made us less safe, according to the candidate.

Then there would have been the added perk of having a conversation about the environment involving a candidate who utters the phrase “climate change.” 

As for the dreaded “spoiler” accusation, Honkala says, “You can’t really spoil something that’s already rotten.”

The folks that I’ve been traveling around with and talking to for twenty-five years are crying because they’re visiting their loved ones in prison, are crying because they are losing their loved ones because they don’t have healthcare.

Honkala would have been the only candidate to talk at length about poverty and poor people. While Obama, Romney and the vice-presidential candidates debated about the status of the “middle class”—a vague term that has come to mean everyone who is not poor or our 1 percent overlords—and President Obama gave a lightning-quick shout-out to the poor, who he referred to as “folks who are striving to get into the middle class,” Honkala co-founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, and is a passionate advocate for families struggling to get by on a few hundred dollars a month.

“Those are people we need to start caring about and doing something about and not just putting out this rhetoric, like [Vice President Joe] Biden was yesterday, saying, ‘We’ve got to begin caring about Main Street, not just Wall Street,’” she said.

Here is Honkala touring poverty-stricken areas of Kentucky in which she refers to the “undemocratic” process of the national debates.

“We intend to occupy the debates if they don’t let us into the debates,” said Honkola.

For more on the benefit of third-party candidates, check out “These Debates Could Use Some Jill Stein and Gary Johnson.”

Members from an Occupy chapter in Georgia have joined forces with Atlanta police. The unlikely partnership emerged when Detective Jaqueline Barber was informed she faced eviction after falling behind on her medical bill payments (Barber has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cell cancer).

That’s when activists joined current and retired Atlanta police Monday for a demonstration.

“The police are in the 99 percent and when it comes down to their economic struggles, we’re going to be there to shine a light on those and organize around those,” said Tim Franzen. He and others who were involved with Occupy Atlanta are now part of a group called Occupy Our Homes ATL, which focuses on the housing crisis.

The mood at the protest was a marked departure from last year when police dressed in riot gear (and some rode on horseback and other officers on motorcycles) moved to violently disperse Occupy from downtown Woodruff Park. Dozens of demonstrators were arrested during the eviction.

Barber is raising four grandchildren (ages 2 through 10) and says that if she’s evicted, she expects that she will be homeless.

She is the second police officer Franzen’s group has attempted to help avoid foreclosure, the first being a law enforcement officer who ended up losing his home in Snellvile, but who is still involved in a court battle over the property.

A twenty-year veteran with APD, Barber retired in 2001 after being struck by a car while on duty. Afterwards, she received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma, and her financial struggles began in 2007 when her adjustable rate mortgage payments when up to $3,886 a month from $2,400. Subsequently, her cancer has come out of remission and she has had to resume aggressive treatment to fight it.

“I didn’t know where else to turn,” said Jacqueline Barber, 62. “I called them because I needed help.”

For two years, Barber tried to get a loan modification from Wells Fargo, and officials at the bank informed her they were working on her case.

“I felt a sense of hope at the prospect of finally getting some relief,” she told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. However, Barber said Wells Fargo sold her mortgage at auction to US Bank while she was in the process of working out the loan modification. A few weeks later she said she received a letter from US Bank demanding she leave the property.

In a last ditch move of desperation, Barber filed for bankruptcy in August, which granted her a temporary stay from eviction.

“U.S. Bank is not interested in helping me. They just want me out,” Barber told the AJC.

Even though family members and supporters are willing to buy back her home, US Bank refuses to consider any options, Barber says.

“She’s not the only one going through this, it could happen to any of us,” said Joyce Sanders, a fellow APD retiree, who stood in Barber’s front yard with other retired officers and members of Occupy Our Homes.

The AJC reports that tens of thousands of other Georgians are in a similar situation. According to federal data, at least 32,000 state residents are now working their way through a federal mortgage modification program.

Fighting back tears, Barber addressed the media in front of her home, saying, “It’s just been hard.”

“I’m just numb, very numb,” she added, “I don’t know what’s going to happen one day to the next. We have no place else to go.”

Sanders took issue with the banks’ seeming unwillingness to work out a payment arrangement with Barber.

“Surely they can bring the mortgage payment down so she can afford it,” Sanders said to CBS Atlanta.

Barber expressed hope that Occupy Our Homes protesters would return if the eviction becomes a reality.

“If they come to put me out, I’ll hope (Occupy Our Homes protesters) will be carried out with me because they’re going to have to physically remove me from the property.” 

“I just want to see the bank do the right thing. I want them to negotiate and talk with me to see if we can work something out,” Barber said to CBS.

CBS Atlanta contacted a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, who says the mortgage company GMAC now holds Barber’s loan.

For more Occupy dispatches from across the US, check out Allison Kilkenny’s coverage of Occupy DC.