Today At #OWS
Over at Naked Capitalism they put up this action request – NYC Residents: Please Attend 6:00 PM Meeting Today to Bar Real Estate Board Plan to Block #OccupyWallStreet Protests. [Update: via Steve Bates, Cynthia Kouril blogged it. Looks like an own goal for the Board.]
The problem for the 1% is that the Occupy Wall Street group keeps abiding by the rules and the laws. That’s why the Казаки have to keep attacking them and setting up traps – these DFH keeps ‘coloring within the lines’. So now they are attempting to change the rules to force them out.
An earlier post explains what is going on – David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet.
Graeber, an anthropologist and one of the earliest members of the OWS movement, discovered that the central cadre of the movement is made up of university educated 20-somethings who have always ‘played by the rules’, and now want to know why they haven’t achieved any success, and can’t find jobs. These aren’t DFH radicals, these are ‘American Dreamers’, i.e. they worked hard and went to school as their parents and guidance counselors advised them to do. Now they are worse off than high school dropouts, because they have huge student loans in addition to being unemployed. You can imagine how they react to politicians talking about ‘job training’ to solve the unemployment problem.
Bryce Covert of New Deal 2.0 looks at The Economics Behind Occupy Wall Street: Shameful Income Inequality. While the 1% are making money hand-over-fist, everyone else is going backwards. We have corporate profits and poverty going up at almost the same rate. The system is broken.
5 comments
Please read Cynthia Kouril’s liveblog of that Real Estate Board meeting. From the standpoint of the people who called the meeting, it was an utter failure: neighbor after business after neighbor after local business people appeared, one after another, testifying in support of OWS. Indeed, their only real request was that the drumming be time-limited. The OWS representatives read a statement in which they agreed to limit the drums basically to the workday, when everything else… construction work, etc. … is already noisy in NYC. If the RE Board was looking for an excuse to take action against OWS, they got no help from the neighbors.
OTOH, from the reporting the locals are not very happy with the NYPD and their reactions, so this was a real loser for the opponents of OWS.
This is why I avoid these actions, because I have no tolerance for people stepping on my rights. I was only allowed to accompany my friends to a women’s clinic once, because I got ready to deck a couple of people who started pushing, and did a lot of ‘explaining’ to the protesters in my ‘military command voice’. They were regular escorts, and kept telling me that you have to remain cool. I wouldn’t put up with it.
It takes special people to hold it in when you are being pushed that hard. I’m not one of them.
BTW, Zuccotti Park is a remediation payment, not a public service. The group that owns it built it to get a zoning change they needed, and they would love to be able to develop the space.
Wow the REBNY came a cropper with their disgraceful plan. I am impressed by the support the locals have given.
“Yet another WASPY patrician looking woman says that she has been made a prisoner in her own apt, but not by OWS, by the police. She thinks they are overreacting. She supports OWS” Excellent!
Over here the news is the closure of St Paul’s Cathedral on health and safety grounds. The Occuoy London protestors had camped in cathedral grounds and seem to have behaved very well especially when services are underway.
Interestingly the trustees of the Cathedral are:
Chairman
Sir John Stuttard PWC partner, Former Lord Mayor of London.
Trustees
The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, Dean of St Paul’s
Dame Helen Alexander DBE Deputy chair of the CBI, director of Centrica plc
Lord Blair of Boughton Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Roger Gifford Investment banker, big in City of London
John Harvey – Not clearly identified
Joyce Hytner OBE – Theatre director
Gavin Ralston Global Head of Product and leading international asset manager at Schroder Investment Management
Carol Sergeant CBE – Chief Risk Director at Lloyds TSB, formerly Managing Director for Regulatory Process and Risk at the FSA
John Spence OBE – Former Managing Director, Business Banking, LloydsTSB
Hmmm,
Yes, Jams, I really think it was an own goal, totally, although there will be some modification of the drumming schedule to maintain the obviously good relations with their neighbors.
Oh, Jams, all of those people from The City couldn’t possibly have any problem with a protest targeting them. [/snark] I can’t imagine that the list of trustees had anything to do with its choice as a location by the Occupy group.