Shaping the Future of NYC

Less Visible Occupy Movement Looks for Staying Power

2 04 2012

WASHINGTON — Six months after the Occupy movement first used protests and encampments to turn the nation’s attention to economic inequality, the movement needs to find new ways to gain attention or it will most likely fade to the edges of the political discourse, according to supporters and critics.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Occupy activists gathered in Northampton, Mass., during a stop on a bus tour this year.

“They have fewer people, and it’s not a new story anymore that there were people protesting in the streets or sleeping in parks,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal organization that has strong ties to top Democrats and has encouraged the protests. “They need to think of new ways to garner attention and connect with people around the country.”

Driven off the streets by local law enforcement officials, who have evicted protesters from their encampments and arrested thousands, the movement has seen a steep decline in visibility. That has left Occupy without bases of operations in the heart of many cities and has forced protesters to spend time defending themselves in court, deterring many from taking to the streets again.

In Oakland, Calif., which at one point last year appeared to be one of Occupy’s strongholds, activists have had less than a handful of marches this year and no longer have any encampments in the city, according to a police official there. In New York, where the police evicted protesters from Zuccotti Park in November, the few protests in the past few weeks have been smaller than the ones last year, the police said.

With less visibility, the movement has received less attention from the news media, taking away a national platform.

Occupy does not have a traditional leadership structure, making it difficult for the movement to engage in conventional political organizing in support of state legislators and members of Congress, like the Tea Party has. And some activists, angry at politicians across the board, do not see electoral politics as the best avenue for the movement, complicating efforts to chart its direction.

Occupy activists acknowledge that building and maintaining a populist movement is daunting and that the clashes over the right to protest have drained some energy.

Bill Csapo, a 58-year-old member of Occupy Wall Street, the New York branch of the movement, answered the phone number listed on its Web site and offered his take on the group’s standing.

“Are we a little scarred? Of course,” he said.

He added: “The people who were driven out of Zuccotti Park in November haven’t gone anywhere and are still working. All the original committed people are still here. This is not a game — we are trying to save our civilization.”

Brian Grimes, a member of the movement who has been spending his days at McPherson Square in Washington, where the police still allow sit-ins and tents, acknowledged that the group needed to adapt its tactics to remain relevant.

“Like you’ll find in anything, you can’t stick to the same thing,” said Mr. Grimes, 35, of Montgomery County, Md. “Whether it’s education, health care or protests, you cannot be static, and you have to change your tactics.”

Mr. Grimes said that new ways of gaining attention could come in the form of flash mobs or banner drops from buildings, like the ones used by protesters in Europe.

“We need to keep them guessing,” he said, referring to the news media and the police.

The movement’s staying power will depend on the success of several events planned for the coming weeks. Despite recent actions that have fizzled, including an Occupy Corporations day in February, organizers are planning a strike and demonstrations on May 1, International Labor Day. But the response has been mixed, and activists now say that Americans could show sympathy for the cause in other ways, like not shopping that day.

Chris Longenecker, 24, a member of the group who is helping to organize the strike and protests in May, said the lull in attention over the past few months was due to the group’s focus on building up capacity for larger events.

“We are looking to late spring and summer,” he said. “We are reconnecting with our passive supporters who saw us lay more dormant in the winter. We have spent the vast majority of the winter laying roots across community organizations and labor andimmigration.”

Whether Occupy has a resurgence, it has already had a significant influence on American politics, making economic inequality — and specifically the top “1 percent” — a major issue in the national dialogue.

In December, 48 percent of Americans said they agreed with the concerns raised by Occupy, although only 29 percent approved of the way the protests were being conducted,according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

After that poll, Pew stopped surveying specifically about the movement. “The movement was not in the news as much coming into 2012, and the nation’s focus and our polling turned to the Republican primary,” said Michael Dimock, an associate director of research at Pew.

News coverage of Occupy has fallen off significantly since late last year, according to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In October, coverage of Occupy made up 6 percent of the news generated by news organizations in the United States. That number climbed to 14 percent in the middle of November and then slid to 1 percent in December. The number remained below 1 percent in January and February and has been so small this month that the Project for Excellence in Journalism said it was equivalent to no coverage.

Although the coverage has fallen off, concerns about economic opportunity and equality are at the highest levels since the mid-1990s.

In a poll released by Pew on March 2, 19 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside of our control,” the highest number since 1994.

What is more, 40 percent of Americans — also the highest number since 1994 — agreed with the statement that “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.”

Ms. Tanden, of the Center for American Progress, said that even if the Occupy movement did not regain significant visibility, it would continue to have an impact on the presidential election, having forced even Republicans to begin talking about inequality.

“It wasn’t Democrats who said that Mitt Romney was a ‘vulture capitalist,’ it was Rick Perry,” she said, referring to the Texas governor and former Republican presidential candidate.

Erik Eckholm contributed reporting from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/for-occupy-movement-a-challenge-to-recapture-momentum.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse

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Categories : Dissent/Rebellion

Facebook’s Female COO

28 03 2012

Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer and she previously worked at Google as well. She speaks regularly about women in the workforce, particularly about their place in male dominated industries (such as technology), and in C-level positions. These are links to an article about her in The New Yorker and two talks that she gave, one at a TED conference and one at Barnard’s commencement ceremony.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta

http://barnard.edu/headlines/transcript-and-video-speech-sheryl-sandberg-chief-operating-officer-facebook

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Categories : Announcement

Inequality Undermines Democracy

28 03 2012

By EDUARDO PORTER

Americans have never been too worried about the income gap. The gap between the rich and the rest has been much wider in the United States than in other developed nations for decades. Still, polls show we are much less concerned about it than people in those other nations are.

Policy makers haven’t cared much either. The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate. Even as the income gap has grown enormously over the last 30 years, government has done little to curb the trend.

Our tolerance for a widening income gap may be ebbing, however. Since Occupy Wall Street and kindred movements highlighted the issue, the chasm between the rich and ordinary workers has become a crucial talking point in the Democratic Party’s arsenal. In a speech in Osawatomie, Kan., last December, President Obama underscored how “the rungs of the ladder of opportunity had grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk.”

There are signs that the political strategy has traction. Inequality isn’t quite the top priority of voters: only 17 percent of Americans think it is extremely important for the government to try to reduce income and wealth inequality, according to a Gallup survey last November. That is about half the share that said reigniting economic growth was crucial.

But a slightly different question indicates views have changed: 29 percent said it was extremely important for the government to increase equality of opportunity. More significant, 41 percent said that there was not much opportunity in America, up from 17 percent in 1998.

Americans have been less willing to take from the rich and give to the poor in part because of a belief that each of us has a decent shot at prosperity. In 1952, 87 percent of Americans thought there was plenty of opportunity for progress; only 8 percent disagreed. As income inequality has grown, though, many have changed their minds.

From 1993 to 2010, the incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans grew 58 percent while the rest had a 6.4 percent bump. There is little reason to think the trend will go into reverse any time soon, given globalization and technological change, which have weighed heavily on the wages of less educated workers who compete against machines and cheap foreign labor while increasing the returns of top executives and financiers.

The income gap narrowed briefly during the Great Recession, as plummeting stock prices shrunk the portfolios of the rich. But in 2010, the first year of recovery, the top 1 percent of Americans captured 93 percent of the income gains.

Under these conditions, perhaps it is unsurprising that a growing share of Americans have lost faith in their ability to get ahead.

We have accepted income inequality in the past partly because of the belief that capitalism can’t work without it. If entrepreneurs invest and workers improve their skills to improve their lot in life, a government that heavily taxed the rich to give to the poor could destroy that incentive and stymie economic growth that benefits everybody.

The nation’s relatively fast growth over the last three decades appeared to support this view. The United States grew faster than advanced economies with a more egalitarian distribution of income, like the European Union and Japan, so keeping redistribution to a minimum while allowing markets to function unimpeded was considered the best fuel.

Meanwhile, skeptics of income redistribution pointed out that inequality doesn’t look so dire when it is viewed over a lifetime rather than at a single point in time. One study found that about half the households in the poorest fifth of the population moved to a higher quintile within a decade.

Even though the wealthy reaped most of growth’s rewards, critics of redistribution noted that incomes grew over the last 30 years for all but the poorest American families. And in the 1990s, a decade of soaring inequality, even families in the bottom fifth saw their incomes rise.

Some economists have argued that inequality is not the right social ill to focus on. “What matters is how the poor and middle class are doing and how much opportunity they have,” said Scott Winship, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “Until there is stronger evidence that inequality has a negative effect on the life of the average person, I’m inclined to accept it.”

Perhaps Americans’ newfound concerns about their lack of opportunity are a reaction to our economic doldrums, with high unemployment and stagnant incomes, and have little to do with inequality. Perhaps these concerns will dissipate when jobs become more plentiful.

Perhaps. Evidence is mounting, however, that inequality itself is obstructing Americans’ shot at a better life.

Alan Krueger, Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, offers a telling illustration of the changing views on income inequality. In the 1990s he preferred to call it “dispersion,” which stripped it of a negative connotation.

In 2003, in an essay called “Inequality, Too Much of a Good Thing” Mr. Krueger proposed that “societies must strike a balance between the beneficial incentive effects of inequality and the harmful welfare-decreasing effects of inequality.” Last January he took another step: “the rise in income dispersion — along so many dimensions — has gotten to be so high, that I now think that inequality is a more appropriate term.”

Progress still happens, but there is less of it. Two-thirds of American families — including four of five in the poorest fifth of the population — earn more than their parents did 30 years earlier. But they don’t advance much. Four out of 10 children whose family is in the bottom fifth will end up there as adults. Only 6 percent of them will rise to the top fifth.

It is difficult to measure changes in income mobility over time. But some studies suggest it is declining: the share of families that manage to rise out of the bottom fifth of earnings has fallen since the early 1980s. So has the share of people that fall from the top.

And on this count too, the United States seems to be trailing other developed nations. Comparisons across countries suggest a fairly strong, negative link between the level of inequality and the odds of advancement across the generations. And the United States appears at extreme ends along both of these dimensions — with some of the highest inequality and lowest mobility in the industrial world.

The link makes sense: a big income gap is likely to open up other social breaches that make it tougher for those lower down the rungs to get ahead. And that is exactly what appears to be happening in the United States, where a narrow elite is peeling off from the rest of society by a chasm of wealth, power and experience.

The sharp rise in the cost of college is making it harder for lower-income and middle-class families to progress, feeding education inequality.

Inequality is also fueling geographical segregation — pushing the homes of the rich and poor further apart. Brides and grooms increasingly seek out mates with similar levels of income and education. Marriages among less-educated people have become much more likely to fail.

And a growing income gap has bred a gap in political clout that could entrench inequality for a very long time. One study found that public spending on education was lower in countries like Britain and the United States where the rich participate more in the political process than the poor, and higher in countries like Sweden and Denmark, where levels of political participation are approximately similar across the income scale. If the very rich can use the political system to slow or stop the ascent of the rest, the United States could become a hereditary plutocracy under the trappings of liberal democracy.

One doesn’t have to believe in equality to be concerned about these trends. Once inequality becomes very acute, it breeds resentment and political instability, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. It can produce political polarization and gridlock, splitting the political system between haves and have-nots, making it more difficult for governments to address imbalances and respond to brewing crises. That too can undermine economic growth, let alone democracy.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

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Categories : Announcement

Coorporate Lobbying on the Rise

27 03 2012

PACs (Political Action Committees), which control most of the corporate lobbying funds, have spend 4X more on the 2012 election then when compared to similar types of groups in the 2008 election.

Article from the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

Find out more about PACS and who is donating: http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/

[iframe width=”500px” title=”Comparison to Date” height=”425px” src=”https://data.sunlightlabs.com/w/hfnu-pptd/38mm-etse?cur=umrvoWxsuhT&from=zuTlyaxj9iK” frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”>Comparison to Date]

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Categories : Dissent/Rebellion

Arrests at Occupy Wall Street Rally

26 03 2012

The police arrested several people on Saturday during an Occupy Wall Streetmarch that organizers said was meant to protest police tactics and brutality. In part, protesters said, the march was meant to object to the police decision last Saturday to close Zuccotti Park and arrest more than 70 people gathered there.

The first arrests took place shortly after about 300 people left Zuccotti Park and began marching north, accompanied by police on foot and riding scooters. On White Street, many of the marchers abruptly turned onto Lafayette Street, breaking away from the attending officers, and running north. Some of them unfurled yellow flags and others a long orange net resembling nets the police have used in the past to corral protesters.

At Canal Street a police commander grabbed a young woman holding the net.

“You’re under arrest,” he said to the woman and then pointed to another woman nearby, saying that she too was under arrest. Officers and protesters surrounded the women as they lay on the pavement with the netting draped over them. They were then taken into custody.

Over the next hour or so, the march continued, passing through the financial district and SoHo, with some protesters shouting invective at the officers and occasionally doubling back on sidewalks in an apparent effort to shake the large police detail following them.

At times the marchers flooded into streets. For a while they stood in an intersection at Spring Street and Mulberry Street, and one person in the crowd fired a confetti gun into the air with a muffled boom, sending multicolored particles of papers floating slowly onto the street.

Police commanders made announcements directing people to the sidewalk, and officers grabbed two men out of the crowd and ordered them to stand next to a police van.

“I was walking across the street,” one of the two, Armin Radoncic, said.

As the marchers moved north on Mott Street, officers entered the crowd on the sidewalk at three different times and made arrests.

One of those arrests involved a young woman who briefly blocked a police scooter from passing down the street. After an exchange with the officer on the scooter, she moved out of the way but was arrested as she stepped on the sidewalk. As in the other arrests, a throng quickly formed, with protesters, onlookers and photographers crowding around and police officers pushing some of them back.

A few feet away a man lay on the sidewalk, shouting that his leg had been injured.

Finally, the marchers made it to Union Square, where protesters have assembled nightly for the past week and police officers have begun using metal barricades to cordon off the park’s southern plaza at midnight.

Inside the park, the protesters beat drums, held meetings and displayed a banner reading “Union Square Park Occupied.” Some of them also pointed to a sign that they said had been affixed to a pole at the park on Thursday by parks department workers and which listed several forms of prohibited behavior.

Gambling and disorderly conduct were forbidden along with “rallying,” the sign said, “except by permit.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 25, 2012

An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly referred to the location at which protesters stopped for a time as the intersection of Spring Street and Mott Street. The post also incorrectly referred to the location at which officers entered the crowd to make arrests as Mulberry Street.

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Categories : Dissent/Rebellion

Iranian weapons help Bashar Assad put down Syria protests

25 03 2012

This recent article delves into the broad array of Iran’s military and technological assistance to Syrian President Bashar Assad, and its attempt to help suppress the anti-government movement.

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/24/10842227-iranian-weapons-help-bashar-assad-put-down-syria-protests-officials-say

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Categories : Announcement, Foreign Policy

Syria Continues Drive to Retake Rebel Strongholds as Diplomacy Suffers a Setback

25 03 2012

This is a recent article from the New York Times about the intensified Syrian uprising.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/world/middleeast/syria-reportedly-continues-drive-to-retake-rebel-strongholds.html

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Categories : Foreign Policy

Sharp Response Meets Return of Protesters

25 03 2012

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

In September they began to gather, their encampment growing by the week. The police, confronted with a populist movement that put down roots in the financial district, were unsure of how to respond to Occupy Wall Street. At some marches, protesters were arrested for veering off the sidewalk into the street; at others, the police ordered protesters off the sidewalk.

Tents were banned early on, then tolerated, then banned again. The mayor said he was going to clear the encampment in October to clean up Zuccotti Park, then balked before finally going through with it a month later, when he sent the police in to clear the camp, in the middle of the night, with little warning.

Now, with Occupy Wall Street’s resurgence, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s response to the protest movement has not been ambivalent. Asked at a news conference on Monday if he had a strategy to prevent large-scale arrests of protesters, Mr. Bloomberg said: “You want to get arrested? We’ll accommodate you.”

While saying that the protests make for “great theater,” he dismissed them as ineffective. “If you have something, really, to say, that would be a great contribution, nobody can hear you when everybody’s yelling and screaming and pushing and shoving,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

On Saturday, the first major conflict between the Occupy Wall Street movement and theNew York Police Department since Jan. 1 took place, with the police arresting 76 protesters. Many of those happened after the police declared the park closed on Saturday night, and ordered everyone out.

On Monday, City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez said he was going to ask the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, to hold hearings to review the police actions. He said he also believed that the Police Department was “using brutal excessive force against peaceful people” during some of the arrests.

Another councilman, Jumaane Williams, questioned whether the police had the authority to close the park on Saturday night, an act that led to many of the arrests. A law enforcement official said the Police Department had decided to declare the park closed because of concerns about vandalism. The official said several electrical outlets at the park had been damaged, though on Saturday night the police told protesters that the park was being cleared so that it could be cleaned.

While most of the arrests were for misdemeanors, three people were charged with felonies: a 23-year old Wisconsin woman accused of elbowing a police officer in the face; a man accused of trying to snatch a gun and a radio from a police sergeant; and a 25-year-old California man accused of pushing an officer, the police said.

On Monday afternoon, a dozen uniformed officers ringed the park in groups of three and four, watching as a smattering of protesters and tourists mingled. One officer said he was not even aware that there had been any arrests over the weekend. There was little indication that the officers on duty — who were detailed to the park from precincts in the Rockaways, the East Village and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn — had received new instructions differing from those in effect last fall.

One officer said that as far as he knew there was only one special rule that the police were enforcing. “Right now, the only rule is you can’t stay overnight,” he said, adding, “No tents, and no tarps or sleeping bags.”

The officer said that beyond that, the police were there just to ensure that there were no fights and to respond to crime. He gestured at a nearby protester, 38-year-old Justin Stone-Diaz, who was at that moment yelling, “Off the buses and into the park!” at a passing bus.

“That guy there — the one yelling — he’s all right,” the officer said. “He’s not bothering anyone.”

A police spokeswoman, Deputy Inspector Kim Y. Royster, said police operations at Zuccotti Park were “assessed daily.”

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/nyregion/with-return-of-wall-street-protesters-mayor-no-longer-seems-ambivalent.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse

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Categories : Dissent/Rebellion

Tolerance for Income Gap Maybe Ebbing

22 03 2012

This article talks about some inequalities related to the income gap.

“From 1993 to 2010, the incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans grew 58 percent while the rest had a 6.4 percent bump. There is little reason to think the trend will go into reverse any time soon, given globalization and technological change, which have weighed heavily on the wages of less educated workers who compete against machines and cheap foreign labor while increasing the returns of top executives and financiers.

“A big income gap is likely to open up other social breaches that make it tougher for those lower down the rungs to get ahead. And that is exactly what appears to be happening in the United States, where a narrow elite is peeling off from the rest of society by a chasm of wealth, power and experience.”

“One doesn’t have to believe in equality to be concerned about these trends. Once inequality becomes very acute, it breeds resentment and political instability, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. It can produce political polarization and gridlock, splitting the political system between haves and have-nots, making it more difficult for governments to address imbalances and respond to brewing crises. That too can undermine economic growth, let alone democracy.”

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Categories : Dissent/Rebellion

New Republic Gets an Owner Steeped in New Media

13 03 2012

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/new-republic-gets-an-owner-steeped-in-new-media/

The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Hughes’s purchase of a majority stake in the magazine will be announced on Friday, once again remaking the masthead of the nearly century-old magazine that helped define modern American liberalism.

His focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.

Mr. Hughes, 28, will become publisher and the editor in chief of the magazine, and Richard Just will remain the editor. Martin Peretz, who was editor in chief from 1975 until 2010, when his title was changed to editor in chief emeritus, will become a member of the magazine’s advisory board. The terms of the sale were not disclosed. Mr. Hughes said he was motivated by an interest in “the future of high-quality long-form journalism” and by an instinct that such journalism was a natural fit for tablets. He said he would “expand the amount of rigorous reporting and solid analysis” that the magazine produces.

For Mr. Just, that means an opportunity to hire more writers and editors — an important step for a publication with a total head count of 29. “It’s been a long time. It’s been years” since total head count increased, he said.

The influence of The New Republic has often outstripped its small staff and its small circulation (around 50,000). Founded in 1914 by the political journalist Walter Lippmann, it has long been a part of the liberal movement, counting presidents as readers, including John F. Kennedy, and luminaries as writers, including George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth.

Under Mr. Peretz’s editorship and ownership, the magazine has passionately supported Israel and drawn criticism at times for its pro-war stances. The magazine’s editorials supported the Iraq War in 2003 and later expressed deep regret for doing so.

In recent years, The New Republic has reduced its publication schedule to biweekly from weekly and redesigned its once-staid pages in an effort to modernize its look. It has also sought to find a successful digital strategy, including charging readers to access some parts of its Web site and by introducing an iPad app.

Mr. Hughes said he expected to “revamp the existing iPad and mobile applications so that they’re clearly an investment for the enterprise.”

The magazine is currently owned by a consortium led by Laurence Grafstein, a longtime media banker. Others in the group include the hedge fund manager William A. Ackman and the real estate developer Michael Alter. The investor group teamed up with Mr. Peretz in 2009 to buy The New Republic back from CanWest Global Communications, a Canadian publisher.

The consortium started to contemplate selling the magazine several months ago. At the time, people briefed on the sale process said the owners wanted to find a partner that could help invest in the magazine’s digital transformation, including developing a more robust strategy for social networking and mobile applications.

Potential partners who had early conversations about the magazine included Jared C. Kushner, the owner of The New York Observer; Thomson Reuters; Yahoo; and Bloomberg L.P. Mr. Hughes was identified as a potential buyer in January by The Huffington Post.

Mr. Hughes, who was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg’s at Harvard and who ran publicity for Facebook at its outset, quit the company in 2007 and joined Mr. Obama’s campaign, where he ran a social network for the candidate’s supporters. He later founded Jumo, an online hub for charities, which merged less than a year later with GOOD, a publishing company that promotes social action.

Mr. Hughes said he would continue to advise GOOD, but The New Republic would be his priority. He will continue to reside in the Hudson River Valley of New York but will visit the magazine’s office in Washington often.

Mr. Just said that Mr. Hughes “has assured me that I’m going to continue to run the editorial side of the magazine.”

Asked how he would turn a profit for the money-losing magazine, Mr. Hughes said, “Profit per se is not my motive. The reason I’m getting involved here is that I believe in the type of vigorous contextual journalism that we — we in general as a society — need.”

He added that he hoped the magazine could be profitable. “But I’m investing and taking control of The New Republic because of my belief in its mission, not to make it the next Facebook,” he said.

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Categories : Media