What Percent Are You?

8 05 2012

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?




Conference Pics

8 05 2012



Turkey claims that Syria’s apprehensive regime will collapse

7 05 2012

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ikFp-bkzlFMKslwxLGAf91a9DAtQ?docId=CNG.4068cc3958df4994bc6d71115552788f.7c1

 

Turkey’s prime minister claims that the collapse of Assad’s regime is inevitable




Occupy Wall Street on May Day

6 05 2012

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

 




Occupy Wall Street: From the Streets to the Archives

2 05 2012

This is a recent article from The New York Times about Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street: From the Streets to the Archives

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Earlier this week a Times article looked at social scientists who are trying tostudy Occupy Wall Street in real time. But a group of archivists are also hitting the streets, and the Internet, in an effort to preserve the movement’s traces for scholars of the future.

Within weeks of the occupation of Zuccotti Park last fall archivists from the New-York Historical Society and other institutions were out scooping up posters, flyers, pamphlets, signs and other ephemera. “For us, it’s an event in New York City,” said Jean Ashton, the society’s executive vice president and director of its library, which has so far amassed several hundred Occupy-related artifacts. “We want to make sure that people understand what happened here.”

Other archivists are collecting some of the explosion of digital materials by and about Occupy. New York University’s Tamiment Library has been recording the meetings of the movement’s Think Tank group and archiving the Web page of the New York group’s general assembly. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit Web site, and the Occupy Archive, a project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, has been collecting material from Occupy sites beyond New York.

So far OccupyArchive has some 3,200 items relating to hundreds of occupations around the country, mostly gathered by volunteers who have scoured the Web for scans of meeting minutes, posters, Flicker photos and other material. “Many local occupations were quite good about keeping minute notes, agendas and that kind of thing,” Sharon Leon, the Rosenzweig’s director of public programs, said. “That will eventually be a rich archive for historians doing work on social movements and post-recession reaction on the left.”

But despite the profusion of material online some archivists say that the historical record of the future may have some gaping holes. While Twitter, Facebook and other social media have been crucial to the movement, the terms of use of most social media sites prevent anyone from publishing material harvested from them. “Look back at the Arab Spring,” said Howard Besser, an archivist at N.Y.U. and founder of Activist Archivists, a group created last fall to coordinate the collection of digital media relating to Occupy. “We actually have precious little that scholars can use to look at how things spread.”

Archiving efforts have also met some initial skepticism from the Occupy movement itself, though Mr. Besser said most people had overcome their wariness about collaborating with traditional institutions. “There are lots of people who don’t get the idea of archiving, but that’s true everywhere,” he said. “Most people, when it’s explained, are very quick to understand.”

Activist Archivists has worked with Occupy Wall Street’s archives working group to create a “Why Archive” postcard to distribute at future demonstrations. (The first of five bullet points: “Accountability. Archives collect evidence that can hold those in power accountable.”) The group has also worked to counter fears that material gathered by archivists could end up being used in legal actions against protesters. Mr. Besser said they were looking into training activists to use ObscuraCam, a technology developed by human rights groups that automatically obscures faces in photographs and videos.

“The archivist part of us says we want to grab everything of enduring value and keep it,” Mr. Besser said. “But the activist part says that we may not want to save certain things, or may not want the police to have access to certain things.”

In the meantime Occupy is also storing its own archive of hundreds of signs, posters, flyers and one-of-a-kind objects recovered after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, like banners for the camp’s kitchen and other facilities made out of orange plastic netting used by the police.

Anna Perricci, a member of the archives working group who is coordinating digital preservation efforts, said that it was important for Occupy to have an active part in curating its own history.

“There are a lot of other people recording the movement and telling its story,” she said. “But I also want to empower occupiers to help preserve what is being made while their story is unfolding.”

 




Israeli Defense Minister Keeps All Options Open on Iran

30 04 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/world/middleeast/barak-says-all-israeli-options-remain-open-on-iran.html?_r=1&hp




Apples Tax Strategy Cheats the US

28 04 2012




Amazing NYC Photos

24 04 2012

Sent from Maggie Dickensen, Macaulay ITF

 

Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City.

The city’s Department of Records has digitized more than 870,000 photos that date back to the mid-1800s taken by city engineers, photographers and police detectives.

Full Story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134408/Never-seen-photos-100-years-ago-tell-vivid-story-gritty-New-York-City.html

25 April 2012
www.dailymail.co.uk




Occupy Wall Street to target shareholder meetings

23 04 2012

Phoenix Business Journal by Kent Hoover, Washington Bureau Chief

Date: Monday, April 23, 2012, 6:59am MST

 

Corporate America, get ready: The folks who brought you Occupy Wall Street last year may confront you at your next shareholder meeting.

Activists with The 99% Spring coalition already have disrupted shareholder meetings this year at EQT Corp. (EQT), Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) and BNY Mellon (BK). Now they’ve announced a full schedule of “non-violent direct action” at shareholder meetings, starting next week with Wells Fargo and General Electric.

The coalition, which is composed of groups ranging from MoveOn.org to the Service Employees International Union, plans to block entry to the Wells Fargo (WFC) annual shareholder meeting in San Francisco April 24. What’s their beef with Wells Fargo? They want the bank to stop foreclosing on homeowners and pay more taxes — the bank’s effective tax rate has been low in recent years because of losses at its Wachovia acquisition.

Leni Juca, owner of Oxium Copy and Print in New York City, will travel to San Francisco to protest Wells Fargo’s investments in the GEO Group Inc., a private-sector company that operates the Queens Private Correctional Facility in New York.

“When I learned how Wells Fargo received $43 billion of taxpayer money in the bank bailout a few years ago and then invested in for-profit immigrant detention centers infamous across the country for substandard conditions and the pain they cause our families, I had to take action,” Juca said.

His message to Wells Fargo: “Stop investing in private prisons; start investing in small businesses.”

Maybe Juca isn’t aware that Wells Fargo takes pride in being the nation’s top lender to small businesses.

For Wells Fargo and other companies targeted by anti-corporate activists, the demonstrations will be a hassle and a public relations challenge. But they also will be an opportunity to tell their story, and explain their business practices.

For The 99% Spring, the demonstrations will be an opportunity to, in its words, “confront CEOs and other members of the 1% over their economic concerns.”

On May 1, protesters will hit three shareholder meetings: the Hershey Co. (HSY) in Hershey, Pa.; Great Plains Energy (GXY) in Kansas City; and Peabody Coal (BTU) in St. Louis.

The Bank of America (BAC), Wellpoint (WLP), Pepco (POM), Amazon (AMXN), NextEra Energy (NEE), Comcast (CMCSA) and Walmart (WMT) also are on their hit list.

One of their gripes against Wellpoint has to do with money that health insurers gave to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for use in opposing health care reform in 2010. The chamber also spent a lot of money on political races that year, mostly supporting Republicans. Its refusal to reveal its donors sparked an uproar — even PresidentBarack Obama weighed in, calling the chamber’s political activity “a threat to democracy.”

Today, the chamber was the scene of yet another protest. Union members and relatives of workers who died from job-related injuries or illnesses marched in front of the chamber. Why pick on the chamber? Because it’s spearheading the anti-regulatory movement in Washington, which has kept the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from protecting workers like it should, said Walter Jones, who chairs the American Public Health Association’s occupational safety and health section.

Fewer workers would be killed, maimed or sickened “if the chamber would lighten up a bit,” Jones said.

The chamber denies that it’s anti-regulation. It just wants agencies like OSHA to consider the costs, as well as the benefits, of its regulations, and adopt rules that are reasonable. It doesn’t apologize for being the business community’s most powerful advocate in Washington, and seems to take price when it’s singled out for protests.

 

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/morning_call/2012/04/occupy-wall-street-to-target.html

 




Zimmerman Case

20 04 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/us/george-zimmerman-to-appear-in-court.html
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/george-zimmerman-apologizes-trayvon-martin-family-could-released-152857774.html

There are new evidence to the case that suggests that the shooting may have been done in self-defense. It was said that a photo was released that shows injury to the back of Zimmerman’s head. There are concerns that this trial will cause conflict between the black and the white community. Already, there are several protests across the country that demand for the conviction of Zimmerman. Celebrities, priests, and other influential peple such as Obama have had their input on this case. In addition, there might be an issue with the media coverage of the case. It seems as if the media was set to condemn Zimmerman from the start, from their use of words and photos in their reports.