Shaping the Future of NYC

I found an interesting blog on Wall Street Journal where it has a calculator that tells you where in the population you stand in terms of the percentage. (“We are the 99%” is Occupy Wall Street’s slogan)

Click here to check out where you belong to!

The Occupy Wall Street movement seeks to speak for the bottom 99% of the population by income, which includes pretty much everyone who makes less than $500,000 a year.

According to the protesters’ unofficial website, “Occupy Wall Street” is a leaderless movement of people from many different backgrounds. “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” the website says. A related site called We Are the 99% records stories from people around the country.

The calculator above shows where your income stands on the wide range of the 99%. An annual salary above $506,000 puts you in the top 1%, while you need to make less than $2,500 a year to be in the bottom 1%. Where do you stand?

May Day Slideshow ↓(click photo)

For decades, workers in Europe, South America and China have been celebrated with an official holiday on May Day.

The United States, however, has not followed suit. (Britain and Canada have tried to wash out the holiday’s leftist hues.) Even though the day’s origins date to a riot in Chicago in 1886 known as the Haymarket massacre, labor is celebrated in the United States in early September.

Socialists and trade union movements have long used May Day as a protest day. And on May 1, the Occupy movement hoped to bring numerous cities to a standstill in commemoration of International Workers Day.

That did not happen. However, in New York the protests continued into the wee hours of the next day, with about 2,000 marchers gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza on Water Street after dark and several hundred returning to Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s former home base, after midnight.

The police said that 34 people were arrested and another 52 issued desk appearance tickets for lesser offenses by the end of a day that also included pickets, marches and rallies in Midtown, Union Square, Washington Square Park and on the Lower East Side.

For more…