at Reason:
If you paid attention to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, you probably know that some of the centralized institutions charged with disaster relief, such as the Red Cross and FEMA, performed very poorly. You may also have heard about Occupy Sandy, an Occupy Wall Street spinoff devoted to helping people after the storm; by all accounts it performed very well. The latter group’s effectiveness was recognized even by the Department of Homeland Security, an organization not ordinarily inclined to look kindly on the Occupy movement. …
Leahy denies that there “explicit injunction” not to work with Occupy Sandy. Those three anonymous sources seem to disagree. ProPublica also interviewed several Occupiers who “say the Red Cross did not take their calls in the early days and weeks after the storm hit.” One of them reports that a Red Cross worker said “they couldn’t be seen working with us.”