Category: Economy

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

Spirits were high last night as occupiers were joined by 92-year-old folk legend Pete Seeger for a late night march to Columbus Circle, where a midnight performance featuring Seeger’s grandson Tao Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, composer David Amram, bluesman Guy Davis and others.

A live stream of the action offered millions an opportunity to view the transcendental nature of the moment that was unfolding. The march was one of the most inspiring yet because the repetitive chants were abandoned for folk songs Pete Seeger & others are known for singing. “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep” & “This Little Light of Mine” were all sung by people while marching to Columbus Circle.

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It was truly a spiritual experience and opportunity for younger generations to hear some of the best folk/protest music in the history of America. Songs like “This Land is Your Land” have become patriotic songs yet the song written by Woody Guthrie is actually a song for revolutionaries. That is why a sanitized version of the song is often sung. Pete Seeger actually sang the version with lost verses during a “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial that was part of Obama’s Inauguration.

This is one of the typically absent verses:

“As I went walking I saw a sign there

   And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

   But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,

   That side was made for you and me.”

Pete Seeger, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin and David Amram joined Occupy Wall Street on a march from Broadway and 95th Street in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, down to Columbus Circle at Broadway and 59th Street. When we got there, this is what happened.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman celebrates the Occupy Wall Street movement’s ability to refocus the country’s and Washington’s attention from deficits to jobs when economists like Krugman could not. “It turns out that no number of learned papers on how we’re doing this wrong, no number of sober editorials on how we’re doing this wrong was making a dent.”

I visited Zuccotti Park yesterday. Michael Moore gave a short speech, transmitted by the human microphone. I gather that right-wingers are claiming that OWS is anti-Semitic; someone forgot to tell the excellent Klezmer band.

Overall, what struck me was how non-threatening the thing is: a modest-sized, good-natured crowd, mostly young (it was a cold and windy evening) but with plenty of middle-aged people there, not all that scruffy. Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect to shake up the whole national debate. Yet it has – which can only mean one thing: the emperor was naked, and all it took was one honest voice to point it out.

As for how the emperor got that naked: read Ari Berman’s article on the austerity class, and its dominance in Washington.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – When “Occupy Wall Street” protesters took over two parks in Portland’s soggy downtown, they pitched 300 tents and offered free food, medical care and shelter to anyone. They weren’t just building, like so many of their brethren across the nation, a community to protest what they see as corporate greed.

They also created an ideal place for the homeless. Some were already living in the parks, while others were drawn from elsewhere to the encampment’s open doors.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

If you have to ask , you haven’t been listening

Cenk Uygur and “The Young Turks” are at Occupy Wall Street in New York City all week.

In this interview, writer Jesse LaGreca tells Cenk about becoming Fox News public enemy No. 1 after he called out a producer’s biased questions in a clip that made it online, if left on the cutting room floor.

A campaign against arbitrary searches by the NYPD gets a boost from Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street headed to Harlem Friday afternoon in a solidarity march that ended with the arrests of a few dozen protesters including Princeton professor Cornel West – just days after his arrest in Washington, D.C., at another demonstration.

The arrests, which occurred after marchers linked arms in front of a fortress-like NYPD station just off Frederick Douglass Boulevard, were a planned act of civil disobedience.

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Finally, here is West’s speech just a few minutes before he and other protesters were arrested:

The New York Post reported there will be more arrests of Occupy Wall Street participants, who do not abide by New York City laws for demonstrations. Bloomberg also warned that a crackdown was coming.

The Post quoted the Occupy Wall Street media coordinator Thorin Caristo, who stated:

  “His inability to create a clear and definitive opinion or position on OWS just shows he’s being tossed around like a bird in a storm. We all know what that storm is, that storm is the growing concern in the higher factions of Wall Street, that this movement might actually be making a difference…The mayor’s statements sound hardline and I have no doubt he may actually try to enforce those. But we all know that every time excessive police force is used in this situation the movement grows exponentially.”

The city should not take this point lightly. Use of excessive police force or any effort to disperse the encampment will only invigorate the occupation with renewed support. It will only lead to more marches and gatherings that the police will be deployed to babysit. It will only amplify scrutiny of New York City and its police force by the media and the people of the world.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

One of the groups that Health Care for the 99% is planning a major event on October 26, Get Wall Street out of Healthcare!! March Against the Health Insurance Industry. There is a planned march to the offices of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, WellCare and St Vincent’s Community Hospital which closed earlier this year due to bankruptcy. St Vincent’s is a casualty of profit-driven insurers and a healthcare system that leaves 50 million Americans uninsured. There are now no hospitals on the westside below 57th st. I am planning on participating in that march. Stay tuned.

Disgruntled Verizon Communications and Verizon Wireless workers and members of the labor union Communications Workers of America will be joining the “Occupy Wall Street” protest Friday in protest of “Verizon’s corporate greed.”

In a press release issued Thursday afternoon, the CWA said that about 1,000 Verizon workers will meet at Verizon’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street at 4 p.m. ET and march past Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park where “Occupy Wall Street” protesters are gathered. The march will end at a Verizon Wireless dealer on Broad Street. Many of the protesters are then expected to return to Liberty Park and stay through the night.

NYers:

LISTEN UP!

Please come to the meeting tonight or send our messages or write about people coming to the meeting of the combined Quality of Life and Financial District subcommittee

Real Estate Board of New York asking the city to prohibit Occupy Wall Street-style use of public space.

In fact, the Real Estate Board of New York is reportedly preparing to ask the city to endorse universally applicable rules prohibiting future Occupy Wall Street-style use of public space, along with the automatic right to close all spaces at night.

REBNY is the 1%.

The Board’s ranks consist of 12,000 owners, builders, brokers, managers, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, real estate investment trusts, utilities, attorneys, architects, marketing professionals and many other individuals and institutions involved in New York realty.

It didn’t sound like this was as bad as they expected. The Board of Realtors would still have to go through the city council process to get any changes and that won’t happen anytime soon.

  While nearly everyone has acknowledged that the so-called Recovery has been pathetic at best, the implication that most people take for granted is that it is still better than the Great Recession.

  But is that assumption true?

 Take for example a very bottom line measurement – your paycheck.

 Median annual household income has fallen more during the recovery than it did during the recession, according to a new study from former Census Bureau officials Gordon Green and John Code. Between December 2007 and June 2009, when the U.S. economy was in recession, incomes declined 3.2 percent. While during the recovery between June 2009 and June 2011 incomes fell 6.7 percent, the study found.

 This situation won’t change anytime soon, as 9 in 10 Americans don’t expect to get a raise this year.

  That by itself should cast doubt on the assumption that this “recovery” is real, but there are other ways to measure it as well.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Click on image to enlarge

One of the key activists behind Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” is now giving advice to a new group of protesters: the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park – and their offshoots around the country – often cite the mass demonstrations earlier this year in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as their inspiration. So maybe it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Ahmed Maher, one of the leading figures in those Egyptian protests, has been corresponding for weeks with the Occupy Wall Streeters, whom he calls “our brothers.”

Maher is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth, which used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to galvanize Egyptians against President Hosni Mubarak. Recently, however, his attention has turned toward America, where he’s been chatting online with Occupy activists. Those conversations center around practical advice from a successful Egyptian revolutionary. Usually, they occur through Facebook. On Tuesday, for the first time, they happened face to face.

“We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in,” Maher tells Danger Room, and “how to be non-violent with police.”

The “30 Rock” star and newly minted podcaster, Baldwin has, during the protesters’ occupation of Wall Street, advocated for tighter bank regulations and more strict enforcement of those regulations. Arriving around midnight, he tweeted at 1:37, “My thanks 2 Aaron from Brooklyn and Sean from Winnipeg for this evening’s OWS tutorial. My first. A lot of dedicated people at #ZuccottiPark.”

He sent out a series of tweets following his departure, saying, “OWS needs to coalesce around some legislative policy. The ‘occupy’ strategy may be an effective one. But what can each entity agree on?” and “Campaign finance reform remains the linchpin of our democracy’s many problems.”

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The star then followed that defense of banks’ existence, saying, “We need a healthy banking system in this country. We need strong capital markets. What is missing are regulations with teeth.”

Two weeks ago we conducted an anonymous poll on this website to learn more about our visitors. We asked Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán Ph.D, sociologist of the City University of New York to look at the data, which he analyzed to create an original academic paper titled “Mainstream Support for a Mainstream Movement” (pdf).

His analysis shows that the Occupy Wall Street movement is heavily supported by a diverse group of individuals and that “the 99% movement comes from and looks like the 99%.” Among the most telling of his findings is that 70.3% of respondents identified as politically independent.

Dr. Cordero-Guzmán’s findings strongly reinforce what we’ve known all along: Occupy Wall Street is a post-political movement representing something far greater than failed party politics. We are a movement of people empowerment, a collective realization that we ourselves have the power to create change from the bottom-up, because we don’t need Wall Street and we don’t need politicians.

Since our humble beginning a few short weeks ago, we’ve helped inspire people around the world to organize democratic assemblies in their own communities to take back public spaces, meet basic needs, make their own demands, and begin building a better world today.

Below is Dr. Cordero-Guzmán’s executive summary of his findings along with a link to his full academic paper.

Author was arrested alongside Occupy Wall Street protesters after she disputed police claims that they had to clear sidewalk

The feminist author Naomi Wolf has criticised the erosion of the right to public protest in the United States after she was arrested alongside Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York.

Wolf was led away in handcuffs after addressing protesters outside an awards ceremony held to honour New York’s governor, at which she was a guest.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Late Monday night police entered the park to take down the medical tent which is the only tent in the park despite Mayor Bloomberg’s characterization of Liberty Park as a tent city. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was present and participating in the park when the police arrived. Kevin Gosztola at FDL has the account of what happened:

Just before midnight, NYPD officers moved in on the southwest corner of Liberty Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street for the past month, to take down and confiscate a medical tent that had been erected during the day. A commotion immediately erupted in this section of the park. Occupiers rushed over and a human chain around the tent was formed. And, Rev. Jesse Jackson suddenly appeared to help the occupiers defend the medical tent from being forcibly removed.

Rev. Jackson told the occupiers, “I am not visiting, I’m participating.” When asked to link arms and help the occupiers defend the tent, he linked arms with them. They stood their ground and were able to convince the NYPD to back down.

Rev. Jackson was a guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas who stood up to 30 cops shaming their actions and those of their colleagues appeared for an extended inter view with Keith Olbermann.

As hundreds of “Occupy Wall Street” protesters marched to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to demand prosecution of alleged police brutality in the handling of protest crowds over the past month, sources said a police officer who was seen on video using pepper spray on a protester last month violated city guidelines.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, seen above, was seen using pepper spray on a crowd during a demonstration on September 24.

According to sources, an NYPD investigation has found that Bologna violated the department’s rules on pepper spray use, and he will lose 10 paid vacation days.

Bologna can challenge the ruling, according to sources, and can have an administrative trial.

Protesters Storm Governor’s Award Ceremony

Meanwhile, after 6 p.m. other protesters began to swarm a West Village event where former Governor Mario Cuomo was scheduled to a present a “Changer of the Year Award” from the online news site The Huffington Post to his son, Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The protesters called Andrew Cuomo “Governor 1 Percent” and objected to how the governor has not extended the so-called “millionaires’ tax,” allowing for the state’s wealthiest residents to pay fewer taxes starting next year.

Demonstrators wanted the governor to speak directly to them, but it is still unknown if he will address the protesters. Their numbers at the Hudson Street event have also decreased.

Protesters are also rallying against Sotheby’s auction house over a union dispute, and the group plans on holding a vigil at Lincoln Center.

The Granny Peace Brigade is also protesting the the Koch brothers’ involvement in the center and their funding of several Republican issues.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

United States Marine Corps. Sgt. Shamar Thomas from Roosevelt, NY went toe to toe with the New York Police Department. An activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Thomas voiced his opinions of the NYPD police brutality that had and has been plaguing the #OWS movement.

Thomas is a 24-year-old Marine Veteran (2 tours in Iraq), he currently plays amateur football and is in college.

Thomas comes from a long line of people who sacrifice for their country: Mother, Army Veteran (Iraq), Step father, Army, active duty (Afghanistan), Grand father, Air Force veteran (Vietnam), Great Grand Father Navy veteran (World War II).

Thank you, SGT. Thomas, for your service in defense of this country and most of all your voice in support of the Constitutional right to peaceful assembly.

Wall Street has been occupied by protestors for a month now, and the movement is showing no signs of slowing. And New Yorkers are apparently just fine with that.

A Quinnipiac poll released on Monday found that residents of the financial capital of the world are unfazed by the presence of the protestors, who have been mostly in the financial district’s Zuccotti Park but also made their way to Times Square on Saturday night, and that two thirds of New Yorkers agree with the views of Occupy Wall Street.

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested for demonstrating Oct. 1 on the Brooklyn Bridge may demand trials if charges against them aren’t dropped and some demonstrators are seeking the arrest of police officers, a month into the New York protest against economic inequality.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office is considering a request to drop charges, National Lawyers Guild attorney Martin Stolar said today outside the DA’s office after a meeting. Stolar said he hopes for a response in a few days.

“We are prepared to try every single case,” said Stolar, whose organization has offered to represent the protesters. ‘For any clients who want to take the option of, ‘I’m innocent — I’m not pleading guilty,’ we’re prepared to provide them with pro bono counsel to exercise their right to go to trial.”

If the cases all are tried, they will tie up resources of New York’s courts, Stolar said. He said 765 people were arrested at the bridge. The DA’s office said it was 267 and all but 17 got desk appearance tickets.

ALBANY, N.Y. – The push for a higher tax on New Yorkers making more than $1 million a year is getting fresh life with a new poll showing overwhelming support, a high-profile rally on Monday and the strengthening Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City.

The Siena College poll found 72% of New York voters support the tax to avoid further budget cuts. Just 26% oppose the proposal by powerful Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Also Monday, the union-backed “99 New York” rally supported extending the current so-called “millionaire’s tax” on New Yorkers with incomes over $200,000. It’s due to expire Dec. 31.

Standing in the way of renewing the current surcharge on the wealthy and Silver’s millionaire tax plan are Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his fiscal ally, the Republican majority of the Senate.

Cuomo says taxing wealthier New Yorkers at higher levels would likely send the rich to Connecticut and New Jersey, taking their income tax revenue and jobs with them.

The argument against continuing the millionaire’s tax by Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has no basis in reality. Except for the Republican Golisano and a Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about his friends, no evidence has been given that while the tax has been in effect that millionaires and jobs have left New York State.

Deputy inspector Johnny Cardona faces inquiry over alleged assault amid questions over NYPD’s policing of protests

A second senior New York police officer is being formally investigated over allegations that he assaulted an Occupy Wall Street protester, raising fresh questions over the NYPD’s deployment of supervisors on the front line in volatile public order situations.

The officer, who has been named in news reports as deputy inspector Johnny Cardona, was filmed on Friday grabbing the protester from behind, spinning him round and appearing to punch him in the face so hard that he fell to the ground.

The New York Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent mayoral agency that deals with allegations of excessive or unnecessary force against police, is now investigating the incident, along with a number of other complaints over policing of the protests.

This is the second inquiry the board has launched in the last month into an alleged assault by a senior NYPD officer on Occupy Wall Street protesters. It is also investigating the use of pepper spray on peaceful female protesters by another deputy inspector, Anthony Bologna, who is also the subject of an internal NYPD inquiry.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Tens of Thousands Flood the Streets of Global Financial Centers, Capitol Cities and Small Towns to “Occupy Together” Against Wall Street Mid-Town Manhattan Jammed as Marches Converge in Times Square

New York, NY — After triumphing in a standoff with the city over the continued protest of Wall Street at Liberty Square in Manhattan’s financial district, the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread world wide today with demonstrations in over 1,500 cities globally and over 100 US cities from coast to coast. In New York, thousands marched in various protests by trade unions, students, environmentalists, and community groups. As occupiers flocked to Washington Square Park, two dozen participants were arrested at a nearby Citibank while attempting to withdraw their accounts from the global banking giant.

“I am occupying Wall Street because it is my future, my generations’ future, that is at stake,” said Linnea Palmer Paton, 23, a student at New York University. “Inspired by the peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, tonight we are are coming together in Times Square to show the world that the power of the people is an unstoppable force of global change. Today, we are fighting back against the dictators of our country – the Wall Street banks – and we are winning.”

The Occupy London and Wall Street protests reflect deep anger that no one has been called to account for the financial crisis

The only surprise about Saturday’s occupation of the London Stock Exchange is that it took so long to happen. No doubt the government and banking lobby was hoping that the final report of the Vickers commission last month would draw a line under so-called banker bashing in the UK. As Basil Fawlty might have put it: “I crashed the global economy once, but I think I got away with it.”

So why won’t popular protests go away? Here’s why: there has been no public inquiry into the causes of the crash. No calling to account of those who drove the ship on to the rocks. No assertion of the public interest over financial markets. No subordination of banks to the needs of the real economy. No politician who dares face down global finance. No challenging of the defunct dogmas of neoliberal economics. No attempt to reverse the breathtaking wealth grab by the 1% at the expense of the rest.

Why should we be surprised that these protests are springing up, and why should we expect them to dissipate until these failures are addressed?

Well I’m finally back here at work after another recent series of personal adventures; in the middle of all the fun I’ve been finding time to get down to my local “Occupy” event, and for those of you who have not been keeping up I thought we’d take a moment today to compare a bit of Fox-driven perception to the reality I’ve been seeing.

What I’ve been told to expect, at least in certain quarters of the public space, are dirty filthy hippies with no jobs or ambitions hoping to destroy America while having deviant public couplings fueled by the free distribution of dangerous psychotropic drugs.

Sadly, I’ve found that there’s not really much truth in that description, even as tiny bits of it do ring true; but with a manifesto in hand and a few conversations under my belt we’ll see what we can do to create a picture that will surprise a lot of the 99% who already support Occupy Wall Street, even if they don’t know it yet.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

We Don’t Need No Permits To March

October 15 Times Sq.

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) — Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City today culminated with a Times Square rally that drew thousands opposed to economic inequality, echoed by protests from London to Tokyo.

Participants in the month-old movement marched past a JPMorgan Chase & Co. branch early in the day to urge clients to close accounts. Twenty-four were arrested later at a Citigroup Inc. office, the police said, and about 6,000 gathered in Times Square, the organizers estimated.

Hong Kong, Sydney, Toronto and other cities also saw protests, which turned violent in Rome, in what organizers called a “global day of action against Wall Street greed.” Backers say they represent “the 99 percent,” a nod to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s study showing the top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of U.S. wealth.

“The world will rise up as one and say, ‘We have had enough,'” Patrick Bruner, an Occupy Wall Street spokesman, said in an e-mail. A news release from the organization said there were demonstrations in 1,500 cities worldwide, including 100 in the U.S.

NYC Live Updates:

   8:50 p.m. 700 reported in Washington Square Park. Music and food there.

   8:30 p.m. Scanner says riot cops in full gear, nets out, headed to the crowd, 47th and 6th.

   8:11 p.m. White shirt just ordered #NYPD line AWAY from barricades. Crowd ROARS

   8:08 p.m. Tension escalating, police ordering protesters to step away from barricades.

   8:02 p.m. Mario: 4 paddy wagons and arrests at 46 and 6th ave.

   8:00 p.m. Police are arresting occupiers at 46th and 6th.

   7:30 p.m. Unconfirmed estimates ranging as high as 50,000 people in Times Square.

   6:45 p.m. Police have trapped people in times square with barricades.

   6:35 p.m. A horse just went down. Crowd is going wild. NYPD says anyone near barricade is going to jail. This is is inexcusable. (Source)

   6:22 p.m. Police on horseback arrive. Police pulling people out of crowd and attacking them. Protesters are rushing barricades.

   6:10 p.m. Police in riot gear retreat.

   6:05 p.m. Police are in riot gear.

   6:00 p.m. Backup has arrived. Estimated 15,000 in Times Square

   5:49 p.m. Orange nets along Broadway.

   5:45 p.m. Five thousand more on their way from Liberty Square and other locations.

   5:30 p.m. Thousands arrive in Time Square. Now livestreaming: http://www.livestream.com/occu…

Greg Mitchel at The Nation has a great running account of the event in Times Square and from around the world with links: The OccupyUSA Blog: Special Weekend Edition!

General Assembly–Arcata Plaza, Oct 12th

A seagull careens overhead and trills its high pitched cry as it makes an acrobatic dive for some crumb left on the plaza. My eyes follow the dive though I continue to be present with the circle. I am unaccustomed to such a glorious day. The sun is uninhibited, actually warming my skin, and there is only a gentle breeze. No sign of the more typical bone chilling North Coast cold, gray wind.

We sit on the grass in a loose circle. Two young men fight with mock swords behind us, laughing at their own missteps and brilliant parries. Beyond them a group of hitchhikers spange pedestrians likely to have money in their pockets. A single squad car and officer look on, disinterested. I am at peace. Despite my appearance, I belong.

The moderator is a gentle, open woman in a cowboy hat and well worn jeans. She keeps the meeting low key and the anger that bubbles up at other meetings is quickly dissipated by her soft spoken interjections. She has us introduce ourselves and say something about why we are here.

To my left a traveling college student introduces himself in English heavily accented by his native French. He has come here to see the differences between American revolution and French. Next to me is a man who arrived on bicycle in a worn denim jacket, decorated with various writings and hand drawn art. His gray hair is tied out of a weather beaten, bearded face. He tells about arriving in Arcata in the late 60’s, the last time revolution was in the air. He has waited a long time to see it resurface and glad that it has finally come.

The young man to my right says his name is Mango and the man next to him is Forrest. These are “forest” names, of course. A long tradition from Redwood Summer, when tree-sitters, trying to save the last of America’s Redwoods, gave arresting officers these false names, making conviction more difficult. Their speech is more angry than the rest, but it is redirected by the group away from aggression at the CEO’s of banks, toward education of their customers. The group decided on a lobby sit-in for two of the major banks in a few days.