Last Friday, my college-age daughter was applying for a part time job at a retail outlet. In the meandering path job interviews sometimes take, the manager began talking about Occupy Wall Street. “They should get jobs,” said the manager, who said that he was the child of eastern European immigrants. “The world doesn’t owe them …
This is a picture of Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia Police Department captain, being arrested with other Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park last week. Lewis was carrying signs a pair of signs urging New York City cops to join the protests. “NYPD Don’t Be Wall Street Mercenaries,” one read. Lewis was highly critical …
Among the few embarrassing experiences left to a person in his fifties is to be exposed as a naif. Over the years I’ve grown quite complacent, in my aging bourgeois post-9/11 whiteness, to snuggle myself under the warm comforter of a visible police presence. It’s been dismaying and alarming and frightening to see what I …
Last year, Mike Bloomberg was my hero. The way he stood up to the opponents of the lower Manhattan Islamic cultural center was eloquent, and courageous, and in the greatest traditions of New York and America. But this year, Bloomie is blowing it. His annoyed, prickly, dismissive, contentious treatment of the Occupy Wall Street protesters …
In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi recommends five demands that the Occupy Wall Street protesters ought to set as their agenda: “1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. They are …
This is the Occupy Wall Street encampment on its 26th day. The usually sensible Mayor Bloomberg has announced his intentions to perform a wholly unnecessary removal of the “creature comforts” of these peaceful protestors–sleeping bags, tarps, etc.–in what is obviously an effort to break up the protest and cause the participants to lose “unit cohesiveness” …
ZUCCOTTI PARK, LOWER MANHATTAN, NOON, OCTOBER 13TH Read More »