Winter has seen Occupy Wall Street shift gears. Meetings have moved indoors, and the movement is now more a networkMore…
All posts tagged Zuccotti Park
Living Politically
Less than ten years ago, a day of international protests swept across the globe, involving millions of human beings for nearly a full 24 hours. It was a global protest against the United States starting a war against Iraq, and was, as far as we know, the first coordinated global protest against state-sponsored violence. A few years before that, at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, a series of intense, angry protests against global economic injustice began. These actions occurred repeatedly over several years, and across several continents. As recently as the winter of 2011, there were enormous protests in Madison, Wisconsin against anti-union legislation. The protests were explicitly focused on class and inequalities, not just on wealth, but also on the discrepancy of power between the very rich and the rest.
Occupy: Stage Two
Bloomberg cleared Zuccotti Park in the early morning hours of November 15 just like university administrators often push through unpopular changes during the summer, when students are sparse. His rationale? Safety and health. This in a city where there are potholes inside of potholes, vomit and urine regularly on subway platforms, and gunshots within earshot of most neighborhoods. Walking through the cleared out park the next day, newly lit up for the holidays yet now devoid of life, I found myself with tears of frustration.
Occupy: Gotham?
Director Christopher Nolan hints at Occupy themes in the first full trailer for The Dark Knight Rises.
Feeding OWS
Diligence. Work. Revolution. My first night sleeping in Zuccotti Park, at about one in the morning, some be-suited white guyMore…
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
When I arrived at Zuccotti Park on the night of Tuesday, November 15th, I was struck by the way in which the mass of people was arranged and how the NYPD had turned the surrounding blocks into a paramilitary zone. I’d seen large numbers of people in Zuccotti Park before … This was a very different scene.
Evicting the Public
Across America police have been called to clear protestors from parks and university campuses. Ostensibly progressive cities like Portland and Oakland have been in the vanguard of evictions. From Harvard to Berkeley, university presidents have joined mayors in using police in riot gear to remove students and other protestors from campus lawns. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took pride in giving police a direct order to evict the original Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park. The police moved in at night and made a point of blocking media coverage of their actions.
