September 17, 2012
Happy Birthday Occupy! Income Inequality Is Still Getting Worse. Occupy Wall Street may well have been the first global protest movement to rally around a statistic cribbed from an economics paper. So to mark its one year anniversary today, I thought I’d break out some of the latest numbers tracking U.S. inequality, courtesy of this month’s Census Bureau recent report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage.  From 2010 to 2011, the top 5 percent of U.S. households upped their share of the country’s income by 5.3 percent. The top 20 percent got a 1.6 percent bump. And while the country’s poorest saw their piece of the pie grow by a smidgen, the middle classes lost ground. Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]

Happy Birthday Occupy! Income Inequality Is Still Getting Worse.

Occupy Wall Street may well have been the first global protest movement to rally around a statistic cribbed from an economics paper. So to mark its one year anniversary today, I thought I’d break out some of the latest numbers tracking U.S. inequality, courtesy of this month’s Census Bureau recent report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. 

From 2010 to 2011, the top 5 percent of U.S. households upped their share of the country’s income by 5.3 percent. The top 20 percent got a 1.6 percent bump. And while the country’s poorest saw their piece of the pie grow by a smidgen, the middle classes lost ground.

Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]

3:32pm
(Notes: 176)
  
Filed under: News Occupy Occupy Wall Street Charts Economy Income inequality Politics 
May 1, 2012
Occupy Wall Street’s Debt to Melville On May 1, students and activists are planning to revive the Occupy Wall Street movement with a general strike. One poster making the rounds on Facebook and other social media features a hamster nervously eyeing a treadmill, and above it the famous words, “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO.” The hamster’s wheel of course represents the drudgery of our modern routines; the phrase, many will recall, comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Subtitled “A Tale of Wall Street,” this cryptic narrative traces the sad fate of a passive-aggressive writer who refuses to vacate the offices of a corporate lawyer. Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street. It may seem odd to understand Occupy Wall Street through a story written 150 years before the tents went up in Zuccotti Park, when no one had heard of a human microphone and when Trinity Church was the tallest building in New York. But Bartleby literally does occupy Wall Street — specifically the offices of Melville’s narrator, a lawyer for the 19th century one-percenters who does “a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds.” And the way that Melville represents Bartleby’s occupation can help us understand the power of the endlessly intriguing movement that is promising to return with renewed fervor this spring. What’s more, this staple of the English Literature curriculum can speak to the ways that Wall Street itself is coming to occupy the classroom itself. Read more.

Occupy Wall Street’s Debt to Melville

On May 1, students and activists are planning to revive the Occupy Wall Street movement with a general strike. One poster making the rounds on Facebook and other social media features a hamster nervously eyeing a treadmill, and above it the famous words, “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO.” The hamster’s wheel of course represents the drudgery of our modern routines; the phrase, many will recall, comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Subtitled “A Tale of Wall Street,” this cryptic narrative traces the sad fate of a passive-aggressive writer who refuses to vacate the offices of a corporate lawyer. Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street.

It may seem odd to understand Occupy Wall Street through a story written 150 years before the tents went up in Zuccotti Park, when no one had heard of a human microphone and when Trinity Church was the tallest building in New York. But Bartleby literally does occupy Wall Street — specifically the offices of Melville’s narrator, a lawyer for the 19th century one-percenters who does “a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds.” And the way that Melville represents Bartleby’s occupation can help us understand the power of the endlessly intriguing movement that is promising to return with renewed fervor this spring. What’s more, this staple of the English Literature curriculum can speak to the ways that Wall Street itself is coming to occupy the classroom itself.

Read more.

4:45pm
(Notes: 68)
  
Filed under: Books Bartleby the Scrivener Herman Melville Occupy Wall Street May Day Occupy Protests 
April 16, 2012
Remember the Pepper-Spraying Cop? If you are looking for something to read today, I highly recommend the “Reynoso Task Force Report,” with its accompanying “Kroll Report” appendix. These are the findings of the panel chaired by Cruz Reynoso, a well-known former Justice of the California Supreme Court, charged with looking into the causes and consequences of the pepper-spraying episode at UC Davis last November. […] Campus police and others come in for their share of criticism, including specifically the police lieutenant who has become notorious from the picture above. Both he and the UC Davis police chief remain on paid administrative leave. But at face value its findings are also very damaging to the still-serving Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi. For instance, the Kroll report says about a letter asking the demonstrators to disperse: “Chancellor Katehi told Kroll investigators that Student Affairs wrote the letter and that she did not review it before it went out. The record contradicts both of these statements, as detailed below. Katehi did review the letter, provided an editorial change and approved it. Student Affairs did not write the letter…” Read more. [Image: Brian Nguyen/The Aggie]

Remember the Pepper-Spraying Cop?

If you are looking for something to read today, I highly recommend the “Reynoso Task Force Report,” with its accompanying “Kroll Report” appendix. These are the findings of the panel chaired by Cruz Reynoso, a well-known former Justice of the California Supreme Court, charged with looking into the causes and consequences of the pepper-spraying episode at UC Davis last November. […]

Campus police and others come in for their share of criticism, including specifically the police lieutenant who has become notorious from the picture above. Both he and the UC Davis police chief remain on paid administrative leave. But at face value its findings are also very damaging to the still-serving Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi. For instance, the Kroll report says about a letter asking the demonstrators to disperse:

“Chancellor Katehi told Kroll investigators that Student Affairs wrote the letter and that she did not review it before it went out. The record contradicts both of these statements, as detailed below. Katehi did review the letter, provided an editorial change and approved it. Student Affairs did not write the letter…”

Read more. [Image: Brian Nguyen/The Aggie]

8:17am
(Notes: 82)
  
Filed under: UC Davis Occupy Occupy Wall Street Protests Pepper spray Linda Katehi News 
March 22, 2012
longreads: The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about:  At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice work, and his family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. He once spent a semester running a health program in Senegal, and upon his return, he got involved with a protest by dining services workers. Zucker, who was hooked after first swinging by McPherson in early October, represents the liberal side of the movement. He wants universal health care and federal takeovers of big banks, and he thinks Occupy Wall Street is a good way to make it all happen. That’s a sharp contrast with Murphy, a Long Beach native who earned his high school diploma in 2004 but never graduated. At 17, he was sentenced to more than two years in the California Youth Authority for stabbing three people at a coffee shop after his friend was punched. “The Occupiers: A Liberal and a Radical Struggle for the Soul of a Movement.” — Andrew Katz, The Atlantic See more #longreads on #OWS

longreads:

The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about: 

At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice work, and his family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. He once spent a semester running a health program in Senegal, and upon his return, he got involved with a protest by dining services workers. Zucker, who was hooked after first swinging by McPherson in early October, represents the liberal side of the movement. He wants universal health care and federal takeovers of big banks, and he thinks Occupy Wall Street is a good way to make it all happen.

That’s a sharp contrast with Murphy, a Long Beach native who earned his high school diploma in 2004 but never graduated. At 17, he was sentenced to more than two years in the California Youth Authority for stabbing three people at a coffee shop after his friend was punched.

“The Occupiers: A Liberal and a Radical Struggle for the Soul of a Movement.” — Andrew Katz, The Atlantic

See more #longreads on #OWS

(via longreads)

10:54am
(Notes: 29)
  
Filed under: Occupy Wall Street Politics Occupy 
November 22, 2011
"First I didn’t pay enough attention,but as much as I have to say, I can certainly recognize the need to express the feeling of the people who have suffered from this Walstreet power, that kind of distrust and misconduct from the Walstreet in many respect. But as a movement it’s still in a very primitive form, and you can see the kind of hopeless struggle because it seems to have no structure to get the message across, or even let people know what ind of message it is. Or it has become lacking of content or successfully expres its own purposes during the development. It’s lack of means to really create change."

— Ai Weiwei on Occupy Wall Street. Read more.

11:11am
(Notes: 50)
  
Filed under: news occupy wall street international ai weiwei occupy politics 
November 21, 2011
What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Police Brutality Over the years, I’ve heard a fair number of slurs shouted at campus cops. Seldom were they “pig” or “fascist.” Far more often, they diminished the power of the officer, using words like “fake cop” or “rent-a-cop”.This is where the power and class dynamics get tricky.They are real cops. Employed by California, they are agents of the state. They’ve got weapons. And the pay is not bad at all. On the other hand, campus police at U.C. Berkeley, and to a lesser extent at U.C. Davis, patrol kids who’d call themselves failures if they grew up to be cops; kids who have more opportunities than the children of the campus cops; kids who will mostly be more successful than campus cops; kids who even enjoy the ultimate loyalty of U.C. faculty and most administrators. Just look at what happened after U.C. Berkeley administrators sent in cops with batons, and U.C. Davis administrators sent in cops with pepper spray. Predictable altercations occurred. Batons and pepper spray were used. Images leaked. And suddenly the administrators were launching investigations! And issuing statements about how deeply they cared for the students! Did they fail to anticipate that the weapons would be turned on passive protesters?  They’d do well to read “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell’s reflection on his time as a British imperial police officer in Burma, if so. To be clear, I don’t think imperialism is an apt analogy when police forcibly remove Occupy Cal or Davis protesters. But I do think Orwell helps us understand why officers who aren’t monsters might use wildly excessive force. Read more.

What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Police Brutality

Over the years, I’ve heard a fair number of slurs shouted at campus cops. Seldom were they “pig” or “fascist.” Far more often, they diminished the power of the officer, using words like “fake cop” or “rent-a-cop”.

This is where the power and class dynamics get tricky.

They are real cops. Employed by California, they are agents of the state. They’ve got weapons. And the pay is not bad at all. 

On the other hand, campus police at U.C. Berkeley, and to a lesser extent at U.C. Davis, patrol kids who’d call themselves failures if they grew up to be cops; kids who have more opportunities than the children of the campus cops; kids who will mostly be more successful than campus cops; kids who even enjoy the ultimate loyalty of U.C. faculty and most administrators. Just look at what happened after U.C. Berkeley administrators sent in cops with batons, and U.C. Davis administrators sent in cops with pepper spray. Predictable altercations occurred. Batons and pepper spray were used. Images leaked. And suddenly the administrators were launching investigations! And issuing statements about how deeply they cared for the students! Did they fail to anticipate that the weapons would be turned on passive protesters? 

They’d do well to read “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell’s reflection on his time as a British imperial police officer in Burma, if so. To be clear, I don’t think imperialism is an apt analogy when police forcibly remove Occupy Cal or Davis protesters. But I do think Orwell helps us understand why officers who aren’t monsters might use wildly excessive force. Read more.

10:07am
(Notes: 181)
  
Filed under: occupy uc davis news 
November 17, 2011
"I feel so energized. It’s amazing what a little pepper spray will do for you"

—

Dorli Rainer, the 84-year-old woman pepper sprayed at Occupy Seattle

Eighty-four-year-old activist Dorli Rainey tells Keith about her experience getting pepper-sprayed by the police during an Occupy Seattle demonstration and the need to take action and spread the word of the Occupy movement. She cites the advice of the late Catholic nun and activist Jackie Hudson to “take one more step out of your comfort zone” as an inspiration, saying, “It would be so easy to say, ‘Well I’m going to retire, I’m going to sit around, watch television or eat bonbons,’ but somebody’s got to keep ’em awake and let ’em know what is really going on in this world.”

10:32am
(Notes: 596)
  
Filed under: news politics occupy occupy wall street 
October 26, 2011
Average Income of Top 1% Rose 275% since 1979

According to a new Congressional Budget Office report released on Tuesday, since 1979 the average, after-tax income of the top one percent of American households has risen 275 percent. Meanwhile, for the poorest one-fifth of the country, it’s gone up just 18 percent. And for the biggest slice of “middle class” America — the three-fifths of homes between the top and bottom 20% — incomes have risen just 40%. Read more.

8:33am
(Notes: 324)
  
Filed under: news business politics occupy ows 
October 19, 2011
The 1% Ain’t What It Used To Be Megan McArdle snags some interesting data:  I was back at the University of Chicago this weekend for my tenth business school reunion.  And while I was there, I ran into Professor Steven Kaplan, who has done a bit of research into what sorts of occupations contributed to rising income inequality. (Shockingly, finance played a large role.)  And he told me that my initial assumption seems to be correct: the incomes at the very top started falling in 2008.  The Piketty-Saez data, which currently run to 2008, show a little bit of it.  But Kaplan has calculated the incomes of the top 1% and the top 0.1% for 2009, and his results show that they continued to fall pretty steeply.  (There’s nothing more recent than that because tax data take a while to be finalized). Read more.

The 1% Ain’t What It Used To Be

Megan McArdle snags some interesting data:

 I was back at the University of Chicago this weekend for my tenth business school reunion.  And while I was there, I ran into Professor Steven Kaplan, who has done a bit of research into what sorts of occupations contributed to rising income inequality. (Shockingly, finance played a large role.)  And he told me that my initial assumption seems to be correct: the incomes at the very top started falling in 2008.  The Piketty-Saez data, which currently run to 2008, show a little bit of it.  But Kaplan has calculated the incomes of the top 1% and the top 0.1% for 2009, and his results show that they continued to fall pretty steeply.  (There’s nothing more recent than that because tax data take a while to be finalized). Read more.

4:01pm
(Notes: 82)
  
Filed under: business national politics occupy occupy wall street ows 
October 19, 2011
Naomi Wolf Arrested at a Occupy Wall Street Protest

Feminist author Naomi Wolf was arrested in New York outside an event that was awarding Gov. Andrew Cuomo. According to The Guardian’s account of the incident, there was around 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters who were gathered outside Skylight Studios to demonstrate against Cuomo’s opposition to a millionaires tax while he was inside being honored by the Huffington Post with a “Game Changer of the Year Award.” The police were apparently trying to keep the sidewalks clear. Read more.

8:40am
(Notes: 83)
  
Filed under: news occupy occupy wall street politics 
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