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Occupy Sandy, Once Welcomed, Now Questioned

The Occupy movement’s relief team still hasn’t disbursed all the money it raised to help one of New York City’s hardest hit neighborhoods. An incomplete section of the destroyed Rockaway Beach boardwalk, May 31, 2013. squirrel83/Flickr Nearly eight months after Hurricane Sandy destroyed almost three miles of historic boardwalk along the Rockaway peninsula at the southern end of New York City, the shore hums with sounds of $140 million worth of beach recovery: circular saws, jack hammers, and tractors. While construction continues around the clock, officials have reopened beaches in hopes that a vibrant tourist season will kickstart the local economy; on this hot June day, a handful of surfers catching breaks on the city’s only legal surfing beaches is one tangible sign that the work to remediate 1.5 million cubic yards of displaced sand has been successful. Now, beyond immediate relief work and the big-ticket city spending—the A train is finally rumbling along elevated tracks to Far Rockaway—community organizers can rattle off a shopping list of daily small-dollar needs that don’t usually get their own entries in big-name relief agency spreadsheets: Community garden maintenance, recovering lost furniture or hiring a killer grant writer to ensure the money keeps flowing. As relief turns to long-term recovery, community activists have their eyes on a group they know has some money left unspent: Occupy Sandy. After Superstorm Sandy hit New York last October, Occupy Wall Street—the global protest movement against economic inequality that started in downtown Manhattan—set up a new group, Occupy Sandy, and mobilized thousands of supporters to raise more than $1.37 million, according to finances made public on their website. But here’s the thing: Roughly one out of every five dollars raised—nearly $300,000—remains unallocated. According to interviews with Occupy Sandy organizers, it’s been more than three months since the group began the process of giving this remaining money over to community groups in the hardest-hit areas. Only a fraction of the $150,000 that has already been allocated to the Rockaways has so far been disbursed. Meanwhile, as Americans face an ever-increasing number of natural disasters and extreme weather events, more recent victims like those in tornado-devastated Moore, Oklahoma, are looking to Occupy Sandy as a model to replicate, warranting a closer look at how the group balances its books. So far, there’s no clear picture of how nearly $240,000 of funds already allocated have been, or will be, spent. Bre Lembitz, an original Zuccotti park occupier, now Occupy Sandy’s bookkeeper, attributes the delay mostly to paperwork snags beyond the group’s control: “The documentation has fallen by the wayside,” she says. “It hasn’t been a priority for people.” Some Rockaway residents say that Occupy Sandy is keeping them in the dark about how they will dish out its remaining money, and that the group, which has no one central location in the city but operates from several hubs, isn’t including them in decision-making. Milan Taylor, the 24-year-old director of the Rockaway Youth Task Force, says Occupy Sandy “was brilliant at first.” In the immediate aftermath of the storm that destroyed 175 houses and businesses here and left 34,000 customers were left without power, sometimes for months, Occupy Sandy volunteers worked side-by-side with locals to lug water and blankets to people in damaged homes or darkened residential towers. They gutted and mucked out houses and educated locals about the health risks of mold infestations, coordinating their efforts via a fleet of vans; they were applauded for agility while the big agency relief machinery ground into motion. “I believe we’ve been hugely successful and we’ve done a lot with a little money,” says Terri Bennett, 35, the co-director of Respond and Rebuild, an arm of Occupy Sandy in the Rockaways. At this point, she says, Occupy Sandy has worked at around 300 homes in the Rockaways and conducted extensive one-on-one surveys of local needs. From L-R: Occupy Sandy organizers Brett Goldberg, Gabriel Van Houten, and Terri Bennett discuss the future of the movement in the back offices of the Pilgrim Church of Arverne. James West “I personally believe they have outstayed their welcome,” says Milan Taylor. But the relationship risks being soured, Taylor says. If Occupy Sandy doesn’t tell the Rockaways community how it plans to spend the rest of the money, ”I personally believe they have outstayed their welcome,” he says. Milan Taylor’s group received Occupy Sandy grants totaling $17,800 in January, but he wonders what will become of the remaining Occupy cash. Just a portion of it could help his group hire a part-time professional caseworker to track teenagers whose education was disrupted for months after the storm. He says he has found it difficult to get information from Occupy Sandy. “Now there’s this additional pool of money they have,” he says, “and it’s like they are changing the rules as things are going along.” But according to Bre Lembitz, the group’s mission has always been to transition to a community-driven approach—it has just taken a little time to get up and running. ”Ideologically this is the best idea, but that doesn’t mean necessarily it can be put into practice,” she says. “I naively thought it was going to be much easier to set up, and it wasn’t.” Occupy Sandy has now convened a panel of 9 people to serve the specific needs of the Rockaways, including 4 residents affiliated with Occupy Sandy, and to decide how their chunk of money gets spent. There is no timeline for this, but organizers say some grants might begin to flow in another month’s time. As for the nearly $300,000, Lembitz says Occupy Sandy is “in the process” of having open meetings “where the community can come together and decide how best to allocate the rest of the money.” But apart from one debrief session, the group’s public calendar is bare through the end of the year. Bre Lembitz, 23, is Occupy Sandy’s book keeper. James West The Rockaway peninsula is split from east to west along historic socio-economic lines: The poverty rate in densely-populated Far Rockaway to the east, where there are number of big public housing developments and nursing homes, is around 22 percent. On the Western tip in Breezy Point, it’s 2 percent. That makes navigating local needs and politics especially important. “It’s pretty frustrating,” says Robyn Hillman-Harrigan, who runs Shore Soup Project, a group that provided more than 50,000 hot meals door-to-door in the aftermath of the storm. She goes out of her way to say she’s supportive of the bigger Occupy Sandy principles, and thinks its efforts have been largely commendable. But she can’t help but see the irony of a small group making decisions about money meant for the many. “It feels like a club,” she says. Terri Bennett defended the makeup of the new Rockaway panel. “There’s a really fine line between inviting enough people to participate, and inviting too many,” she says. She also says the group wants to avoid being overwhelmed by requests and repeating the mistakes of the past: “I also think that those [community] groups are kind of the same people over and over again that are already involved in these processes, but if we invite people who aren’t normally invited to the table, then it builds a bunch of peoples’ capacities.” This hasn’t stopped the group investing $100,000 elsewhere in a FEMA-approved Staten Island group that, unlike in the Rockaways, puts Occupy Sandy in direct weekly contact with a diverse coalition of established community and faith leaders. Youth leader Milan Taylor says it’s vital for the movement to communicate its plans clearly: “The funding was raised in the name of the Rockaways,” he says. “It’s not complicated if you’re from the community. But for an outsider coming in and trying to understand an entire community history in six months, it’s impossible.” Robyn Hillman-Harrigan, on a rebuilt section of the Rockaway Beach boardwalk. James West Original link: Occupy Sandy, Once Welcomed, Now Questioned ; ;Related ArticlesAre Fungus-Farming Ants the Key to Better Biofuel?How Climate Change Makes Wildfires WorseWhy Colorado’s Fire Losses, Even with Global Warming, Need Not Be the ‘New Normal’ ;

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Occupy Sandy, Once Welcomed, Now Questioned

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"I Can’t Keep This Going": How JPMorgan Chase Changed Its Own Risk Rules and Lost $6 Billion

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Last May, JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in America, lost $6 billion on a risky bet placed by its London office. So far, the bank has been punished with a slap on the wrist, but this week the Senate released a major report and held a Friday hearing on the debacle. The report shows that in the run up to the massive loss, JPMorgan Chase ignored its own risk controls, used fancy math to reduce estimates of losses, and blocked the flow of information to regulators. Regulators, meanwhile, first fell asleep on the job and then tried to downplay the incident.

The bank and its regulators should have seen problems coming. The risks JPMorgan Chase was taking on were so obvious that Bruno Iskil, the trader who made the giant bet, told a colleague last year that the way the bank was cooking its books was “getting idiotic,” and said, “I can’t keep this going,” according to the report. One way the bank “kept this going” was by ignoring its own rules. In the first four months of last year alone, the London office broke its risk regulations 330 times. In order to avoid those pesky rules, JPMorgan Chase simply changed how it measured risk, with approval for those changes going all the way up to CEO Jamie Dimon himself.

JPMorgan Chase managers also “pressured” its traders to lowball losses by some $660 million over several months by changing how they calculated them, the report says.

The bank did send its regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, reports revealing it was breaking its risk rules by the hundreds, but the OCC officials at Friday’s Senate hearing said that they were more focused on what they considered “riskier” parts of the bank.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held the hearing, asked one OCC official if the bank’s fancy new risk measurements should have been a “red flag.” The OCC official said yes.

JPMorgan Chase didn’t just ignore its own rules—it ignored the government’s rules, too. For several weeks last year, the bank simply stopped giving profit and loss reports to the OCC because Dimon said “it was too much information to provide.” Dimon, who is accused of withholding information about the daily losses, allegedly raised “his voice in anger” at a deputy who later turned over the info, the report says.

The bank “failed to send regular reports in…the same months the trade tripled size,” Levin said. “Why…did OCC examiners that oversaw the London office not ask the bank for the missing reports until mid-April after the media storm?”

“This is something we should have been all over from Day One,” admitted Scott Waterhouse, the main OCC official in charge of overseeing JPMorgan Chase.

And what about “If the OCC had required the London office to document its investment decisions?…Would it have learned of the trade earlier?” Levin asked. Yes, OCC officials said. “There were red flags we failed to notice and act upon,” Tom Curry, the comptroller of the currency, admitted.

“The skepticism and demand for hard evidence that might be expected of bank regulators were absent,” the Senate report concluded.

Maybe that’s why regulators tried to play down the crisis after the fact. The day after JPMorgan Chase announced its loss, the head of the OCC’s Large Bank Supervision division, Michael Brosnan, told Curry the trades were not that big a deal, calling it an “embarrassment issue,” and adding that “at end of day, they are good at financial risk management. But they are human and will make mistakes.”

Mother Jones
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"I Can’t Keep This Going": How JPMorgan Chase Changed Its Own Risk Rules and Lost $6 Billion

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