Tag: Occupy Wall Street

The 99 Percenters – Why is New York the Center of their Protests?

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice2 Comments

There are a lot of good reasons for centering the protests in New York, the proximity of the video and print media, the enormous number of opinion leaders in the area, and certainly the ability to recruit and maintain large numbers of protestors.

This would have been very difficult in Washington. Most of that city is a ghetto with little of the private infrastructure available in a modern metropolitan area.

But the history of Wall Street has to be a factor. It’s been a center of corporate power in the United States for almost two full centuries, and only the excesses of the Gilded Age rival the current levels of self-contentedness and pride among the wealthy today.

But there is also this article below. It has some powerful observations about why New York is such a good venue for the 99 percenters. —

Christopher Ketcham writing in McClatchy’s has a new article entitled –

Occupy Wall Street: The new populists?

The focal point, however, is specific: Manhattan. The capital of the finance corporations whose speculation, chicanery and outright fraud have produced havoc and pain for so many Americans. It sets the model nationally for a metastasizing economic regression: the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few.

Out of the 25 largest cities in the United States, New York is the most unequal when it comes to income distribution. In New York, the top 1 percent of households claimed 44 percent of all income during 2007 (the last year for which data are available). That’s almost twice the record-high levels among the 1 Percenters nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007. During the housing bubble that ended in our current calamity, the average income for the 1 Percenters in New York went up 119 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of homeless in the city rose to an all-time high last year, with 113,000 men, women and children retreating night after night to municipal shelters. The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women age 25 to 34 with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers – defined broadly as those earning between $29,000 and $167,000 – saw a 19% decrease in earnings. Almost 11 percent of the population in New York, about 900,000 people, lives in what the federal government describes as “deep poverty,” which for a four-person family means an income of $10,500; the average 1 Percenter household in New York makes about that same amount every day.

(Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/07/126534/occupy-wall-street-the-new-populists.html#ixzz1aKQk8zI2)

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Wall Street Protests Picking Up Speed

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice

The Wall Street Protests are starting to catch on in the media. One major factor is that the protests have spread to 250 cities.

Old story? I don’t think so. I’m seeing a lot more serious articles. The one at the bottom of the page is from the venerable publication, Reuters.

The early coverage suggested that the protesters were crazed lefty’s with no vision and no ideas beside the bizarre. This suggests that much of the national media are effete snobs who don’t know anybody that make less than 250k a year. Unfortunately that is probably true. Here is a quote from Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake. –

Unsurprisingly, the corporate media continue to ignore and deride this movement. It will take independent outlets like Firedoglake and citizen journalists like yourself to give these protests the attention they deserve.

FDL has been covering Occupy Wall Street since day one, and the Dissenter’s intrepid Kevin Gosztola has been the premier source of information for those following the protest. He’s in Washington D.C. right now and will be heading to New York to report live from Occupy Wall Street.

Here’s a quote from Glen Greenwald –

But for those who believe that protests are only worthwhile if they translate into quantifiable impact: the lack of organizational sophistication or messaging efficacy on the part of the Wall Street protest is a reason to support it and get involved in it, not turn one’s nose up at it and join in the media demonization. That’s what one actually sympathetic to its messaging (rather than pretending to be in order more effectively to discredit it) would do. Anyone who looks at mostly young citizens marching in the street protesting the corruption of Wall Street and the harm it spawns, and decides that what is warranted is mockery and scorn rather than support, is either not seeing things clearly or is motivated by objectives other than the ones being presented.

Well, they’re not laughing quite so much in the corporate media. They are less amused in the 24 hour news programs that long ago abandoned any attempt to inform the population resorting to popcorn for the mind – “If it bleeds it leads.” The moral bankruptcy of the journalist class is more and more evident every day.

I want change. The bottom 50% of this nation’s citizens have been shorn like sheep over and over again. It’s time for fairness and above all justice, long prison sentences for the malefactors who destroyed our economy, were bailed out by the government, and now enjoy huge profits. This is the antithesis of justice, a Bizarro society in which up is down and justice is for the “little people” (the ones that build and maintain this country by their hard work and honesty).

Here is Jack Shafer discussing his views of demonstrations. I suggest you go to Reuters and read the whole thing. Shafer is sort of a dinosaur from a different era but he does appear to be willing to learn from experience.

How to cover a demonstration. Or not. By Jack Shafer from Reuters –

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street (or non-organizers, as they would prefer it) have shown real media savvy by staging their demo where the network cameras and the New York Times are. Anything that happens in New York (especially Brooklyn!) is considered by New York media operations to be 100 times more interesting than anything that happens anywhere on the other side of the Hudson River. So what if the Occupy Wall Street message is muddled? The OWS pictures and energy are fresh, mostly because a mass, ongoing demo in New York is a relative novelty. How else to explain the New York Daily News‘ fevered blog coverage today: “Here’s the scene at Zuccotti Park. It is packed. There are about 3,000 people here.” No kidding?! 3,000?! That’s like the attendance at a Midwest high school football championship game!

The press corps would probably be doing more toe-dipping than immersion in its Occupy Wall Street coverage if not for the way it underestimated the rise of the Tea Party over the past couple of years. Just because a group’s message skews toward the inchoate and the emotional doesn’t mean that it doesn’t represent a worthy point of view. The non-organizers of the Occupy Wall Street have deliberately embraced this thought. As long as cameras are counting bodies and recording slogans, the harder work of defining the message can be postponed. The more important task is to introduce people who share frustrations to one another. One measure of OWS’s successful strategy is that labor unions are now joining the “movement.”

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Is a New Movement in American Politics Being Born?

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice

I have been thinking about whether or not the Wall Street Protests now spreading nation wide are the beginning of a significant turning point in American history.

I believe the answer is “probably.” I would prefer a ringing “Yes, this is it!” but after the Obama campaign of 2008, I have lost faith in what are supposed to historical turning points. In that case, we elected a leader who promised real change but who turned out to be a pitiful caricature of his promises. I remember reading Will Durant, an essay he wrote after he felt the disappointment of Woodrow Wilson’s Administration. The Progressives, Durant among them, came out and fought for Wilson’s election only to find he had only limited use for them and their policies. He wrote that you can’t place dependence on any one man when you are part of a political movement. I forgot that lesson of history during the 2008 election. I promise I will not be so foolish again.

But this new movement has several things going for it. One is timing. The United States is suffering under a recession which is highly likely to turn into a full scale depression with the big D. The people of this country who are witnessing the day to day collapse of small businesses, they personally out of work or having direct knowledge of their friends and family out of work are not beguiled by the word of record corporate profits. That money does not flow to them and they are well aware of it. (You are aware the bottom 50% of the citizens of our great democracy have 2.5% of the wealth?)

My local paper is replete with stories of how the real estate market has turned or will turn around – all this while a rational person watches housing prices continue to fall. The local real estate captive paper is more useful for training a dog than as a provider of useful information.

Another thing the movement has going for it is the ability to use the new media effectively. I use a desktop computer and that is the end of my desire for electronics. I don’t want to be communicated with all the time. I like my privacy. But these individuals are quite clever with these new devices using them in a manner more advanced than those who advocated change this Spring in the Middle East and China. They have an amazing web presence.

My third and last reason for the movement’s likely success is the international political climate. The neoliberals of the Chicago School of Economics have been driven from South America and their policies found to be the height of madness and lunacy in Ireland and Iceland. The great philosophical adventure of free market absolutism is dying although I am well aware this beast of prey still has teeth to harm the middle class and poor. Their corporate support is unabated and the money they continue to receive from the looney billionaires who feel oppressed will continue. But being repudiated in much of the world is going to cause the movement many problems most of them long term.

So, I have some hope and a little faith. This may be a turning point in American politics.

James Pilant

Sara Kenigsberg writing in the Huffington Post has a new article:

Occupy Wall Street Protests Ignite Progressive Political Fire In Washington

Leaders at the conference also pressed progressives to focus their energy beyond Obama, highlighting broad dissatisfaction with an administration that has repeatedly derided liberals, dismissing many of the activists present at the conference as “the professional left.” The message from progressive leaders — who included Jones, economist Robert Reich and The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, among others — was clear: Neither political party in Washington is listening to working Americans struggling through the worst recession since the Great Depression. Progressives will have to continue hosting events like Occupy Wall Street that bring voters into the streets and pressure political leaders to take action on the jobs crisis. Progressive members of Congress have already taken note, with the Progressive Caucus — the largest alliance of House liberals — endorsing Occupy Wall Street amid the conference cheerleading.

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Richard Eskow Explains the Central Demand of the Wall Street Protests – SANITY

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice

Richard Eskow has written an article describing the Wall Street Protestors’ demands in one word – Sanity. Here’s a small sample from the article –

Here’s Occupy Wall Street’s “One Demand”: Sanity

Here’s how insane this country has become. You can find “liberal” pundits and leaders from both parties on every channel who will condemn American homeowners as morally bankrupt and unworthy of help. But the banks they trusted, who sold them mortgages on the false promise that real estate values would rise forever, and who then when on a crime spree, walked away free. And their CEOs are broacast and quoted as they were legitimate, mainstream American voices.

That’s insane.

While the middle class dies and the ranks of the poor swell, this country is talking about cutting the government’s spending. While one home in four is underwater, this country’s worried about the financial health of banks. While we fight two unnecessary wars, war criminals like Dick Cheney are given television platforms as if they were simply representing a different political point of view.

That’s insane.

I find these words compelling. I was reading the news when I came across an article in which Dick Cheney suggested that Barack Obama owed the previous administration an apology for criticizing their abandonment of civilized rules and their willingness to torture suspects. That is the world we live in, a place where we have prosecuted and executed a Japanese during the Second World War for waterboarding Americans but have no historical memory to realize it is a war crime. Currently the new media treats things like war crimes as matters of opinion, not facts based on law.

He’s quite right about the media finding certain points of view unpalatable. If tea party republicans threaten to destroy the credit of the United States it cannot be just their fault but the fault of both parties because that is the media narrative – both sides are corrupt and incompetent, a plague on both their houses. My loathing for the ineffectual Democratic Party can be noted by any reader but I can’t help but notice that in earlier debt ceiling votes the Democrats had no held the country as hostage. However, this simple fact could not be mentioned in media accounts because both sides “must” by definition be at fault.

It’s time for sanity, for reliance on the facts and a willingness to speak them. No she said – he said narrative, in which a media personality with the brain power of a small flower explains the horse race elements of a policy dispute but a real discussion in which the impact on Americans of the middle class are honestly discussed.

We can live in a world where things make sense, where justice matters and the media has a legitimate role to play in the political discussion that does no involve false equivalencies.

I strongly sympathize with the Wall Street Protestors. There is going to be a lot more of this. This is just the beginning. Those that make fun of the American Spring are out of touch with America and history.

History is in motion, not with the tired policies of our current place holder in the White House but with the disaffected and the unemployed, those that know the system no longer works.

James Pilant

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