A coalition of people from 27 Occupy groups from around the country, calling itself NOW DC, descended on the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in the nation’s capital Friday.
The several hundred protesters followed a one-mile path from Washington’s Franklin Square to the EPA headquarters carrying a large globe along with two alpacas and chanting their familiar “We are the 99 percent” and “The banks got bailed out, We got sold out” as they made their way.
The NOW DC/Occupy EPA rally came about as a result of discussions online between the various Occupy factions around the country going back to last fall, co-organizer and rally emcee Dr. Margaret Flowers said.
Protesters chanted “Hey!, Hey!, Ho!, Ho! Lisa Jackson’s gotta go” and “Out of your offices and into the streets” once they reached the EPA headquarters.
Occupiers from the Occupy DC and Occupy Washington, DC factions told Red Alert Politics that the movement suffers from an acute lack of focus.
This lack of focus was on display during the group’s Occupy EPA rally, where marchers voiced opposition to everything from the Trayvon Martin case and nuclear power to the treatment of black farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“The EPA is guilty of crimes against humanity for its treatment of communities of color,” an Occupier told the crowd. “A Deloitte study found that it takes 15 years for the EPA to respond to complaints.
“The time has come to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Occupier and anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott accused the EPA of not doing enough to protect Americans from fish contaminated by last year’s Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan.
“The White House sent out a message that no department get involved because Obama is pro-nuclear,” Caldicott said.
However, the facts are that Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, an Obama appointee, personally intervened in the Japanese nuclear disaster in a way that raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill from people like Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who thought he went too far in his response.
The Occupiers used the event to ask participants to attend a hearing on Monday in Federal District Court in Washington at 2 p.m. requesting the court to force the EPA, Interior Department, Commerce Department, Energy Department and Defense Department to develop a comprehensive strategy to reduce cabon emissions by 6 percent annually.
Garrett and Grant Serrels with the Occupy Harrisonburg, Va., group who are plaintiffs in the case say they are basing their lawsuit on the research of Dr. James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist who was discredited in the Climategate scandal.
“This is about the survival of numerous species,” Garrett Serrels said, regarding the threat he sees posed to the globe by manmade global warming. “We are trying to protect air, water and the entire atmosphere.
“The EPA is failing to protect us, which is why we have filed a preliminary injunction to stop climate change.”
Participants ranged from older participants like Dr. Brad Blanton, a veteran of various left-leaning causes going back to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and a serial arrestee at various protest events over the years, to young people like Michelle Johnson, 27, of Lancaster, Pa.
Johnson told Red Alert Politics that she decided to participate because she wanted to express her opposition to fracking to extract natural gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale deposit because they believes the chemicals used in the process are poisoning people.
Occupiers interviewed by Red Alert Politics stated they had either a socialist or an anarcho-syndicalist political orientation.
“I want a voluntary society where workers own their own co-ops unlike in modern corporations where people work for wages from the top down,” said Ben Echert, a member of Occupy Pittsburgh. “We should be like Iceland where no banks were bailed out, and of people on the right I can say that I support Ron Paul.
“Obama is a sellout.”
Asked who he looks up to as political role models, Echert said that he admires people like socialist intellectual Noam Chomsky who endorsed the rally.
And fellow Occupy Pittsburgh member Bryan Fogarty, a self-described socialist, similarly said he would not be voting for Obama.
Some of the Occupy protesters expressed solidarity with rank-and-file Tea Partiers suggesting that agreement can be found between right and left on issues like bank bailouts and crony capitalism.
