PORTLAND OCCUPY

Four of us from Bath went to Portland today to join the Occupy solidarity event. People stood at Monument Square with signs for two hours and then had a march into the Old Port to the office of banksters Merrill Lynch who have been feasting off the taxpayers in Maine.

We first went inside their lobby but were pushed out onto the landing where I held a door open (that the bank workers tried unsuccessfully to close) and we all chanted for some time. Eventually the police came and moved us off the landing, onto the sidewalk, where we resumed our chants and read a script in Occupy-repeat-fashion that outlined the history of the bank's transgressions against Mainers.

We thought maybe Merrill Lynch would open their bank vault and give us a pallet of shrink-wrapped $100 bills that the Portland Occupiers could put around their tents as insulation from the coming cold and snow. But they offered us nothing.

Several media outlets came along to film and scribe before we moved on to the offices of TD Bank where we chanted some more. At this bank we saw people popping their noses up to the windows on virtually every floor in the big building above us. One guy a few floors up opened the window and flashed us the peace sign.

A couple of us are hanging around Portland for our evening monthly meeting of Maine Veterans for Peace.

Tomorrow I head to Boston for a plane to Toronto, Canada where I will speak on Saturday at the University of Toronto. I will talk about the mostly ignored deadly connections between the U.S. war machine and climate change. The Pentagon is the biggest polluter, and energy user, in the world but exempt from Kyoto Protocols and all other agreements that are supposed to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

It's quite remarkable that you almost never hear any environmental group mention the military when they talk about preventing global warming. Why the virtual silence?