After a brief hiatus of relaxing I am back. Over the next however long I will be talking about Occupy Wall Street and my opinions. When I form an opinion of a protest the first thing I always ask is Who/What is behind it? This is not who/what are protesting. What/what organized and funded the protest?
When it comes to Occupy Wall Street this is a difficult question to answer. The organizing body of the protests is the NYCGA (New York City General Assembly). The NYCGA website contains blog posts going all the way back to early August. It is quite apparent from these early posts that the organizers are highly organized and there are quite a few of them. Going all the way back to August 12 the Food committee had at least 5 members and they were already considering the food needs this far back. To me, this is indicates that the organizers of these protests at the very least have significant prior protest experience. A first time organizer is not likely to consider the need of food for the protesters.
There are also indications of an internet committee and a legal committee going this far back, but no indications of how many members there were of these committees. In addition, on September 1st the protesters did a test camping on the sidewalk overnight. They were ultimately arrested, but based on video of this incident there were at least 7 people involved here. Based on this evidence on September 1st I would say it is a very conservative guess that there were at least 20 active organizers.
So now the question becomes who are these organizers and how did so many of them get so organized? Going back to meeting minutes on August 23 there appears to be some international backers of this protest. They indicate coordination with an international group n-1.cc. It also clearly indicates that the NYCGA website nycga.cc was owned by someone in Sweden or Ireland at the time. This to me, confirms my suspicion that there is a large activist body behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.
So what is this activist body, and what do they generally stand for? That is where my research hits a wall. N-1.cc asserts itself to be some type of community built social network. Based on the text on the site I can translate from Spanish to English it seems to be an activist social network, although that is not what it calls itself. However, determining additional details has not born fruit as many of the links on the site do not work.
So my next approach was to try to identify the Whois information for the Occupy Wall Street websites. Unfortunately all of the websites directly related to the NYCGA and Occupy Wall Street use a privacy service that does not show their information. So what about n-1.cc? Looking up n-1.cc revealed that it was owned by Manuel Roman who also happens to own a site manje.net. So I finally found a site with some information. This site contains a “Universal Declaration of Rights of Citizens of the Third Millennium” (Link contains both Spanish and English declarations).
Reading this declaration it seems to say that government has failed, individuals should govern not corporations, everyone has a right to do with their body as they wish, and we need to change our political system to fix this. That is probably not doing justice to the declaration and you really should read it here.
So I still do not have a definitive answer of who or what group is the organizing body behind the NYCGA. I also cannot say that the organizers endorse the statements made on manje.net. But there is definite evidence that the organizers were part of some organization and had at least some financing in organizing these protests. Although, this financing appears to be minimal and may just be money they were able to scrounge up out of their own pockets.