History > 2011 > USA > Politics (III)

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November 2011

http://occupywallst.org/

Arrests

as Occupy Protest Turns to Church

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and COLIN MOYNIHAN

From his spot at the center of Duarte Square in Lower Manhattan, Matt Sky watched on Saturday as hundreds of protesters streamed into the public areas of the triangle-shaped space at the center of an ideological tug of war between onetime allies turned adversaries: Occupy Wall Street and Trinity Church.

That began a long day of demonstrations and marches that extended as far as Times Square and resulted in at least 50 arrests.

By noon, protesters had streamed into the square from all directions under cold, cloudy skies to reinforce the vibrancy of a movement swept last month from another space, Zuccotti Park, and signal a resolve against ecclesiastical leaders resisting their wish to set up an encampment on property owned by the venerable Episcopal church.

“Everything about this movement is momentum,” said Mr. Sky, 27, an Internet consultant from the East Village. “We need to show people that we are still relevant.”

Even before the protesters were displaced on Nov. 15, Trinity gave many of them hot chocolate, blankets and a place to rest at a space owned by the church. But when the Occupy movement expressed an interest in setting up an organizing camp on vacant Trinity property at Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, the church said no.

The Occupy Wall Street forces then directed their skills at the church: They took their arguments to the streets. In familiar fashion, police officers converged on the area, standing around the perimeter.

A flier distributed by protesters summed up their mood: “While the event may include a reoccupation, the event itself is a broader celebration and expansion of Occupy Wall Street,” it said. It also advised people to bring backpacks, warm clothes and sleeping bags.

About 3 p.m., several hundred people began to slowly march along the blocks around the park. They went about five blocks north, then circled back. They were carrying homemade wooden ladders, draped with yellow banners. At Grand Street, the protesters made a move: They threw a ladder fashioned into a portable staircase against a chain-link fence separating the sidewalk from the church’s property.

Many people went over the fence that way. Others lifted the fence from the bottom, allowing protesters to squeeze into the space. The protesters were joined by a few clerics, including Bishop George Packard, a retired former supervisor of Episcopal military chaplains.

Within minutes, police officers began taking people into custody. About 4:15 p.m., Bishop Packard was led into a police van.

On the sidewalk, other officers pushed into a line of protesters, ordering them to disperse.

But hundreds of demonstrators marched up Seventh Avenue on Saturday evening, in the street and on the sidewalk — and against traffic.

Police vehicles — cars, scooters, vans — followed, and there were more arrests.

“Is there a problem?” said one protester, who was on a bicycle, as a police officer grabbed him on West 29th Street, near Seventh Avenue.

“The problem is you’re under arrest,” an officer replied.

Earlier in the day, the Rev. Stephen Chinlund, 77, an Episcopal priest who retired seven years ago, held a placard reading: “Trinity Hero of 9/11. Be a Hero Again.”

The mission of the church was to help those in need, he said.

The church’s rector, the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, expressed sadness over the protesters’ actions on Saturday.

“O.W.S. protestors call out for social and economic justice; Trinity has been supporting these goals for more than 300 years,” Dr. Cooper said in a statement. “We do not, however, believe that erecting a tent city at Duarte Square enhances their mission or ours.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the location of Duarte Square. The lot owned by Trinity Wall Street is near Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, not alongside the church.

    Arrests as Occupy Protest Turns to Church, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/
    nyregion/occupy-wall-street-protesters-march-against-trinity-church.html

Occupy Group Faults Church,

a Onetime Ally

December 16, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

For months, they were the best of neighbors: the slapdash champions of economic equality, putting down stakes in an outdoor plaza, and the venerable Episcopal parish next door, whose munificence helped sustain the growing protest.

But in the weeks since Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, relations between the demonstrators and Trinity Wall Street, a church barely one block from the New York Stock Exchange, have reached a crossroads.

The displaced occupiers had asked the church, one of the city’s largest landholders, to hand over a gravel lot, near Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, for use as an alternate campsite and organizing hub. The church declined, calling the proposed encampment “wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious.”

And now the Occupy movement, after weeks of targeting big banks and large corporations, has chosen Trinity, one of the nation’s most prominent Episcopal parishes, as its latest antagonist.

“We need more; you have more,” one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators. “We are coming to you for sanctuary.”

Trinity’s rector, the Rev. James H. Cooper, defended the church’s record of support for the protesters, including not only expressions of sympathy, but also meeting spaces, resting areas, pastoral services, electricity, bathrooms, even blankets and hot chocolate. But he said the church’s lot — called Duarte Square — was not an appropriate site for the protesters, noting that “there are no basic elements to sustain an encampment.”

“Trinity has probably done as much or more for the protesters than any other institution in the area,” Mr. Cooper wrote on his parish Web site. “Calling this an issue of ‘political sanctuary’ is manipulative and blind to reality. Equating the desire to seize this property with uprisings against tyranny is misguided, at best. Hyperbolic distortion drives up petition signatures, but doesn’t make it right.”

The criticism of Trinity was coming not only from protesters, but even from some Episcopal priests and other Protestant clergy members.

“Trinity Church had a fantastic opportunity to be a Christlike presence by openings its doors to the protesters,” said the Rev. Milind Sojwal, the rector of All Angels Church, an Episcopal parish on the Upper West Side. “And I believe Trinity blew it.”

On Thursday, some church leaders and protesters brought a Nativity scene to Trinity’s main entrance on Broadway, with a sign attached. “There was no room for them in the inn,” it read in part. “Trinity has plenty of room.”

Occupy Wall Street plans to hold a demonstration on Saturday at the lot. Some clergy members have said they planned to attend, and a handful said they may join protesters who have discussed taking down the fences around the lot, risking arrest.

“I’m willing to occupy space in an act of civil disobedience in order to shine a light on social and economic injustice,” said the Rev. John Merz, of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Trinity is not the first Anglican church to grapple with how to respond to the Occupy movement. In London, protesters have camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral for weeks, and the city has sought to evict them.

So vexing is Trinity’s dilemma that one of the world’s most prominent Anglicans, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has issued two statements on the matter: one posted on the Occupy Wall Street Web site, imploring Trinity to “find a way to help” the protesters, and a second, posted on the Trinity Web site, in which Archbishop Tutu said his comments were “not to be used to justify breaking the law.”

Bishop Mark S. Sisk, the Episcopal bishop of New York, and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the top official of the denomination nationally, issued statements on Friday supporting Trinity’s position.

“It is regrettable that Occupy members feel it necessary to provoke potential legal and police action by attempting to trespass on other parish property,” Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori said. “Seekers after justice have more often achieved success through nonviolent action, rather than acts of force or arms. I would urge all concerned to stand down and seek justice in ways that do not further alienate potential allies.”

Older than the country in which it stands, Trinity has a long and storied history. Alexander Hamilton was once a pew holder. The church shook, amid a storm of debris, as the towers of the World Trade Center fell.

Less known, though, is the church’s status as a real estate titan. Since 1705, when Queen Anne of England bequeathed more than 200 acres of what was then farmland to the church, Trinity Real Estate has come to control six million square feet of property, much of it office space around Hudson Square, financing an operation most parishes could never fathom.

“No matter how supportive they may appear to Occupy, no matter how much hospitality they show to Occupy, Trinity Wall Street owns a lot of Lower Manhattan,” said Jim Naughton, a longtime observer of Episcopal Church issues who works as a partner at Canticle Communications, a public relations firm. “They’re vulnerable in that regard.”

On Nov. 15, hours after they were driven from Zuccotti Park, many Occupy Wall Street protesters reconvened at Duarte Square, which some knew to be Trinity’s property. Even before the eviction, protesters had asked that Trinity allow them to use the space, said Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for the group.

A portion of Duarte Square, a small sidewalk with leafless trees, is public. But Trinity owns a larger area that is filled with wooden benches and shrubbery. The private area is currently vacant, enclosed by a locked chain-link fence, but the church says it has licensed the property through April 2013 to a nonprofit arts organization, which holds occasional art exhibitions there.

Critics argued that Trinity’s resources and influence carried with them an added responsibility. The Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in West Harlem, noted that many churches hung signs from their chapels, welcoming passers-by.

And the Rev. Michael Ellick, of Judson Memorial Church, a Greenwich Village congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ, said Trinity needed to do more.

“Charity is not enough,” Mr. Ellick said. “Charity keeps things the same.”

Some clergy, though, said Trinity had already exceeded its Christian obligations.

“Trinity has been more than accommodating to a marginal group of protesters,” said the Rev. J. Douglas Ousley, of the Church of the Incarnation in Murray Hill, an Episcopal parish.

And Robert Bruce Mullin, a professor at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, said it was easy for other churches to criticize Trinity’s use of its property.

“It’s cheap grace,” he said. “It’s great to defend the rights of protesters in someone else’s backyard.”

    Occupy Group Faults Church, a Onetime Ally, NYT, 16.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/
    nyregion/church-that-aided-wall-st-protesters-is-now-their-target.html

Occupy Wall Street Protesters

Report to Court

December 14, 2011
The New York Times
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

The line outside the summons court was longer than normal on Wednesday morning, as those accused of the usual offenses, like allowing a dog to wander off a leash or drinking a beer on a public stretch of pavement, were joined by protesters from Occupy Wall Street.

Many of the protesters, numbering nearly 200, had last seen one another in October after their arrests for crossing the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge; they had ridden the same city bus used to transport prisoners, or had shared stories inside a police precinct station house.

On Wednesday, they had another shared experience, passing through two magnetometers on their way to the fourth floor of 346 Broadway, where court cases tend to move swiftly and are often disposed of with small fines or conditional discharges. The court is normally reserved for cases that can safely be categorized as minor and rarely qualify as headline material.

Inside a courtroom, Judge Neil Ross heard pleas. Many defendants agreed to arrangements that will result in their charges being dismissed if they are not arrested within six months. But others declined, saying they wanted to go to trial.

In total, court officials said, 351 summonses were addressed; most of the protesters faced two separate charges. One hundred eighty-two summonses ended with dismissal agreements; 139 will move forward, perhaps to trials. Judge Ross issued 30 arrest warrants but suspended their execution until January.

Protesters had said they would fight every charge, in effect occupying the court system. But on Wednesday, some said that they had decided to accept the dismissal agreements, in part to avoid future court dates.

“I think it could be really stressful,” said Rosa Lopez, 27, from Passaic, N.J. “I just wanted to get it over with.”

Others said they wanted their day in court. One was Mike Dobsevage, 35, from Danbury, Conn., who said he thought the police had used “trickery, deceit or entrapment” while stopping and arresting the marchers on the bridge. The police said the demonstrators had been warned that taking to the roadway meant that they would face arrest.

Mr. Dobsevage said, “It’s better that this is examined in a court of law instead of being hidden away under a sealed charge.”

More than 700 people were arrested for the Brooklyn Bridge demonstration on Oct. 1. The stream of defendants through summons court is expected to continue this week.

Several defendants, it turned out, could not appear and had authorized their lawyers to enter pleas on their behalf. Among that group were several students taking midterm exams at distant colleges, a professional musician on tour and one man whose lawyer said he could not attend because he was in the middle of a hunger strike in Washington.

Martin J. Stolar, a lawyer representing several protesters, made a motion to dismiss all of the charges, saying the original summonses had been taken from the court by the police and then returned, which he said “raises questions about the integrity of every single summons.”

A prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said the summonses had been removed for the “purpose of supplementing affidavits.”

Judge Ross denied Mr. Stolar’s motion, saying, “There is nothing to suggest any impropriety.”

    Occupy Wall Street Protesters Report to Court, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/nyregion/
    occupy-wall-street-members-report-to-court-for-brooklyn-bridge-rally.html

Gingrich Push on Health Care

Appears at Odds With G.O.P.

December 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and MIKE McINTIRE

Shortly before the passage of President Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009, Newt Gingrich’s political committee put out a video of Mr. Gingrich denouncing it as a “big politician, big bureaucracy, pork-laden bill.”

“It should be stopped,” he said.

But at the same time, Mr. Gingrich was cheering a $19 billion part of the package that promoted the use of electronic health records, something that benefited clients of his consulting business. “I am delighted that President Obama has picked this as a key part of the stimulus package,” he told health care executives in a January 2009 conference call.

After the bill was passed a month later, Mr. Gingrich’s consultancy, the Center for Health Transformation, joined two of its clients, Allscripts and Microsoft, in an “Electronic Health Records Stimulus Tour” that traveled the country, encouraging doctors and hospitals to buy their products with the billions in new federal subsidies. “Get Engaged, Get Incentives,” one promotion read.

As Mr. Gingrich runs for president, he is working to appeal to Republican primary voters suspicious of big-government activism, especially in the realm of health care. But interviews and a review of records show how active Mr. Gingrich has been in promoting a series of recent programs that have given the government a bigger hand in the delivery of health care, and at the same time benefited his clients.

During the Bush administration, he was a leading Republican advocate for the costly expansion of Medicare, which many in his party now regret. And he and his center pushed some policies that are reflected in Mr. Obama’s health care record — a record Mr. Gingrich regularly criticizes on the campaign trail. All the while, his center functioned as a sort of high-priced club where companies joined him in working the corridors of power in Washington and in state capitals.

Mr. Gingrich did not respond to questions for this article. But a spokeswoman for the center said in an e-mail that Mr. Gingrich was a health care “visionary” who, for instance, supported electronic health records “BEFORE it ever came up for discussion by the president or anyone else.”

Mr. Gingrich’s chief Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has found himself on the defensive among conservatives for signing a universal health care law when he was governor of Massachusetts. But Mr. Gingrich has his own history with health care policy, part of which puts him at odds with many Republican voters.

Mr. Gingrich’s ideas and the interests of his clients are often intertwined. When President George W. Bush and some Congressional Republicans were seeking to block renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2007, Mr. Gingrich met with his former conservative House colleagues, arguing that inaction could unfairly harm children. At the time his center was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by major drug makers and insurers, groups that would have been harmed by a lapse in the program.

When he urged Republicans to support the Bush administration’s expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, he worked to ensure that it would cover new diabetes treatments sold by Novo Nordisk, a Danish drug company and a founding member of Mr. Gingrich’s center.

More broadly, he has indicated his agreement with the most controversial aspect of President Obama’s heath care plan, the requirement that every American buy health insurance. Although he now says he is opposed to the so-called individual mandate, in a May 2009 conference call — previously unreported — he told health care executives, “We believe there should be must-carry; that is, everybody should have health insurance, or if you’re an absolute libertarian, we would allow you to post a bond.”

Mr. Gingrich also worked with former Senator Tom Daschle, an early health policy adviser to Mr. Obama, to write a forward to the center’s book on the expansion of electronic health records. “It’s fair to say he was supportive of the goals of health care reform,” Mr. Daschle wrote in a brief e-mail exchange. “And I felt that we were in agreement on some of the principles.”

Mr. Gingrich has defended his support for the prescription drug benefit, and other health care spending, by saying that present costs will be more than offset by future savings. And a spokeswoman for his company, the Center for Health Transformation, Susan Meyers, reiterated Mr. Gingrich’s assertion that he does not lobby. But his dealings with Novo Nordisk show how his center’s policy advocacy could blend with the narrower objectives of its paying members.

Separate from its $200,000-a-year charter membership in the center, Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest producer of insulin, hired Mr. Gingrich to help “position itself as a thought leader” in an initiative to raise awareness of diabetes. A research document prepared in 2003 by the Gingrich Group, a consulting firm related to the health care center, noted that in improving treatment, the company wished to also emphasize insulin-delivery devices that “offer better financial return for Novo.”

Mr. Gingrich’s health center went on to help Novo Nordisk create a national diabetes campaign, and worked to shape government policies toward the disease. According to a presentation by a Gingrich aide to health care executives in 2004, the center was “working to insure” that Medicare covered insulin products manufactured by Novo Nordisk, and Mr. Gingrich planned to meet with members of Congress “to help them develop priorities” on fighting diabetes.

In its annual report to shareholders, Novo Nordisk listed its work with Mr. Gingrich under the category of public-policy activities, noting: “Such activities are often referred to as lobbying.”

But a Novo Nordisk spokesman, Ken Inchausti, said Mr. Gingrich actually did no lobbying for the firm.

“He was providing us with guidance and strategic advice on how best we could inform policy makers,” Mr. Inchausti said, adding that Mr. Gingrich had valuable insights because of his work on diabetes while in Congress.

The devices were ultimately covered. Dr. Mark McClellan, President Bush’s administrator of Medicare and Medicaid Services at the time, said that he did not remember Mr. Gingrich specifically bringing up diabetes issues, but that he had various interactions with Mr. Gingrich.

“A lot of people including Newt had some views and some clients who cared about the issues that we were dealing with,” he said. “I do remember having a lot of discussions about what should and shouldn’t be covered.”

Mr. Gingrich also worked with Dr. McClellan and other Bush administration health officials on electronic records.

“Newt and I had many conversations,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, the Bush administration’s national health technology coordinator. “Because of Newt’s involvement, you dealt with a significant amount of creativity — they had a lot of creative ideas of how it could work and how it should work.”

Over the years, Mr. Gingrich accumulated more and more clients with an interest in building a national electronic health records system: Allscripts, Siemens, Microsoft and GE Healthcare.

Certainly, his belief in the importance of electronic health records fit with his futurist bent. Huge advances in technology, the argument goes, can enable doctors from different hospitals, different fields and even in different states to work off a single electronic file that would include every medical decision and diagnosis in a given patient’s history. Mr. Gingrich was among leaders of both parties who argued that the technology would save lives and billions of dollars while also providing a huge database of results to judge the efficacy of treatments.

Mr. Gingrich found common cause with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a senator from New York; Mr. Daschle, with whom he wrote the introduction to the center’s book, “Paper Kills 2.0”; and Senator Sheldon D. Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island.

Shortly before Mr. Obama’s election in 2008, Mr. Whitehouse and Mr. Gingrich wrote an opinion article in The Washington Times calling for a national, electronic health information system. They also called for the creation of a “comparative effectiveness institute” that could use the network to “collect and understand the best practices of the country’s best providers of care.” Such an institute, they wrote, “could not only educate other providers on how to improve, but also inform policy makers on how to design policy that promotes these best practices.”

When President Obama proposed spending tens of billions on developing just such a system, Mr. Gingrich wrote in The New York Post in mid-January 2009, “The president-elect should be applauded for making this vital priority a key part of his economic stimulus plan.”

Mr. Gingrich’s chief health aide, David Merritt, was invited to testify before a Senate panel on privacy issues related to the creation of the system. During that testimony, Mr. Merritt told the senators, among them Mr. Whitehouse, that while protecting privacy was important, “I think that as we move forward with comparative effectiveness and evidence-based medicine, we need as much data as possible.”

When the bill passed, providing more than $19 billion in incentives and grants to help health care providers buy electronic systems, the center and its health technology clients were in a celebratory mood. In presentations to investors, the Allscripts chief executive, Glen Tullman, called it “the most expansive opportunity in our company’s history,” and “more money coming into a segment than we’ve ever seen.”

In order for Allscripts and other health care systems makers to benefit from incentives and grants, they would need to make sure potential customers knew they were eligible for the cash. And so, joining with industry partners — including another center client, Microsoft — it embarked on an “E.H.R. Stimulus Tour,” visiting cities and providing Webcasts.

In one of the Webcasts, Mr. Merritt joined with Mr. Tullman and the Allscripts marketing chief to walk through the stimulus bill incentives.

When The Wall Street Journal editorial board, in January 2009, criticized the bill for creating a Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, the center was there to defend it. The Journal argued that eventually “the comparative effectiveness outfit will start to ration care to control costs.” In a statement for the center, Mr. Merritt had said that while those fears were understandable, “that argument is not currently justifiable in the specific language of the bill.”

The following August, however, the coordinating council came in for added scrutiny as conservative health care opponents rallied against its creation in angry town-hall-style meetings and online, playing into fears of “death panels.”

Around the same, Mr. Gingrich reversed his call for a “comparative effectiveness institute.”

“In our country, the road to dehumanizing, bureaucratic health care rationing,” Mr. Gingrich wrote in Human Events, a conservative publication, that August, “begins with something called comparative effectiveness research.”

    Gingrich Push on Health Care Appears at Odds With G.O.P., NYT, 16.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/us/
    politics/gingrichs-health-care-policy-history-at-odds-with-gop.html

As Romney Steps Cautiously,

Gingrich Duels With Others

December 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG

SIOUX CITY, Iowa — The leading Republican presidential candidates largely shelved their contentious attacks on one another to deliver their closing arguments on Thursday night at the final debate before the nominating contests begin, but Newt Gingrich did not escape sharp questions about his record in and out of government and his ability to defeat President Obama.

Mitt Romney, who has spent days trying to raise doubts about Mr. Gingrich in interviews and advertising, stood next to his rival on stage and barely engaged him. That task was picked up by others, notably Representative Ron Paul of Texas, who dressed Mr. Gingrich down for profiting from taxpayer-financed entities like the mortgage giant Freddie Mac, and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who challenged him on abortion and the definition of when life begins.

After a dozen debates in the Republican primary race, which ranged from cantankerous to contentious, a forced sense of restraint hung in the air throughout the two-hour debate at the Sioux City Convention Center. Ten days before Christmas, with the Iowa caucuses not far behind, the candidates walked a careful line between making their points without souring voters and challenging their opponents.

Mr. Romney reverted to his cautious, make-no-mistakes posture, devoting most of his attention to Mr. Obama. His advisers made the decision to allow his advertising and his allies to make distinctions for him in the days before the voting begins at the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.

While Mr. Romney declined to engage Mr. Gingrich, the same was not true of the rest of the field, who have limited time to change the campaign’s dynamic.

Mr. Gingrich was asked directly if he was not being “hypocritical” for saying at an earlier debate that Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts should go to jail for his role in overseeing Freddie Mac and the other government-sponsored mortgage companies when Mr. Gingrich had personally accepted at least $1.6 million to help Freddie Mac navigate Republican hostility toward it in Washington. Mr. Gingrich acknowledged that he had supported the concept of providing housing, but said he had called for more regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Mr. Gingrich said, “I think it’s good conservative principle to find ways to help families that are right at the margins to learn how to budget, learn how to take care of a house, learn how to buy a house.”

Mr. Gingrich pushed back against rivals who said that he had worked as a lobbyist, saying, “I did no lobbying of any kind for any organization.”

Mr. Paul, who is competitive with Mr. Gingrich near the top of the polls here, assailed his rival over his support for government-financed programs, saying, “Some people say if it goes to the extreme it gets to fascism.”

Mrs. Bachmann joined in, “You don’t need to be within the technical definition of being a lobbyist to still be influence-peddling,” saying he was bidding “to keep this grandiose scam of Freddie Mac going.” She also warned voters to study the conservative record of Mr. Gingrich, particularly on abortion, and suggested that he had campaigned on behalf of Republican candidates who supported abortion rights. She bristled when he tried to correct her.

“It’s outrageous to say over and over again during the debates to say that I don’t have my facts right,” Mrs. Bachmann said. “I’m a serious candidate for president of the United States, and my facts are accurate.”

From the opening moment, the seven Republican candidates faced a series of questions on their biggest vulnerabilities, a tough, year-end parting gift from the moderators of Fox News, a network that has a lineup of sympathetic opinion hosts, but whose news anchors have pulled no punches on Republican candidates in debates and interviews. The race has played out, to a large degree, on the cable network.

Mr. Gingrich called “laughable” the accusation this week from Mr. Romney that he is an “unreliable conservative.” But, facing some questions about his consistency, Mr. Gingrich said, “I do change things when conditions change,” adding, however, that getting “this country back on track” would be “a very large change.”

As the opening round of Republican voting approaches, Mr. Romney, and to some degree Mr. Gingrich, continue to face questions about their purity as conservatives going back decades. Even after all these months of campaigning, the wariness of the base and conservative litmus tests, more than general election appeal, are driving the nominating process.

The debate carried a heightened sense of urgency as voters, including more than 1,500 who filled the audience at the debate, move closer to making up their minds. The outcome in Iowa could reshape the race — for winners and losers alike — as the contest moves to the New Hampshire primary, followed in January by South Carolina and Florida.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas vowed to be the “Tim Tebow for the Iowa caucuses,” comparing himself to the Denver Broncos quarterback who has managed to pull out victory after victory despite lacking polish and is known for showing his religious faith on the field. Asked to address fears that his inconsistent debate performances would not augur well for him in a potential general election encounter with Mr. Obama, Mr. Perry said he was “ready for the next level.”

Former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, seeking to break out of the Republican pack, appeared to jar the audience when, in talking about the lack of trusting government, he declared: “We have been kicked around as a people. We are getting screwed as Americans.”

Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who has logged more hours and miles in the state than any other candidate, framed his final pitch around his social conservative appeal. He delivered a sharp criticism of Mr. Romney’s evolving positions on abortion and his support for gay rights.

For his part, Mr. Gingrich did not proceed with caution, but rather plunged ahead with expansive proposals that drew booming applause from the crowd. He was pressed on his proposal to eliminate or ignore judges who he deems to have gone beyond the Constitution, with the host Megyn Kelly noting that two conservative former attorneys general have called his position “dangerous, ridiculous” and totally irresponsible.

In response, Mr. Gingrich doubled down. “If you have judges that are so radically anti-American that they thought ‘One Nation Under God’ was wrong, then they shouldn’t be on the court,” he said, referring to a years-old decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the line in the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional in public schools.

He cited Thomas Jefferson’s move in the early 1800s to abolish 18 of 35 federal judges as precedent. When Ms. Kelly noted the move had been “highly criticized,” Mr. Gingrich said to great applause and laughter, “not by anybody in power in 1802.”

But Mr. Paul, a strict constitutionalist, took it as an opportunity to school Mr. Gingrich, saying sternly, “that’s a real affront to the separation of powers.” Yet Mr. Paul may have showed the limits to his appeal among Republicans when he argued forcefully against aggressive action to rid Iran of its nuclear capabilities.

He raised his voice, saying, “You cannot solve these problems with war.”

Mrs. Bachmann, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, accused Mr. Paul of taking a “dangerous” view that would imperil the security of the United States.

The debate, at some points, took on the feel of a revolving firing squad, with the struggling candidates taking aim at their better-positioned rivals. But for the most part, the contenders smiled and refrained from engaging. They often agreed with one another, particularly when asked to name their favorite Supreme Court justice.

Mr. Perry listed three — Samuel A. Alito Jr., John G. Roberts Jr., and Clarence Thomas — and Mr. Romney added a fourth, Antonin Scalia, to the list. When it was his turn, Mr. Gingrich said he agreed with Mr. Romney’s foursome, before adding approvingly that Mr. Scalia was probably the “most intellectual” of the group.

Mr. Huntsman did not get a lot of airtime during the debate, but he sought to make the most of the time he did have. When a doorbell-like sound rang out that his time was about up, Mr. Huntsman began speed-talking, trying to eke out the rest of his response to a question about the role of the United Nations.

“Two dings on that one,” said Bret Baier, the Fox News anchor, when Mr. Huntsman finally finished.

Jeff Zeleny reported from Sioux City, and Jim Rutenberg from New York.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Sioux City.

    As Romney Steps Cautiously, Gingrich Duels With Others, NYT, 15.12.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/us/politics/gingrich-parries-with-challengers-at-iowa-debate.html

 

Holder Speaks Up for Voting Rights

December 14, 2011
The New York Times

For months, the Justice Department has largely been silent as Republican-dominated legislatures in state after state made it harder for minorities, poor people and other Democratic-leaning groups to vote. On Tuesday, however, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. spoke out forcefully and promised to use the full weight of his department to ensure that new electoral laws are not discriminatory. To live up to that vow, he will have his hands full.

Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states have recently enacted laws designed to limit Americans’ access to the polls, often concentrating on voters — blacks, Hispanics, students and the poor — who showed up in large numbers in 2008 to elect Barack Obama. They have imposed strict voter-ID requirements, knowing that millions of people cannot easily meet them; eliminated early voting periods; and restricted registration drives. (Voter ID laws have been introduced in at least 34 states.)

These efforts, Mr. Holder said, have led many Americans “to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble, and essential, ideals.” Quoting John Lewis, the Georgia congressman who was beaten in the 1960s while advocating voting rights for blacks, he said those rights are under attack by “a deliberate and systematic attempt” to prevent millions of voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in democracy.

It was very encouraging to hear Mr. Holder recognize the depth of the assault on a fundamental constitutional right. The question is how far he will use his department’s power to stop it. On that subject, he was a little vague, promising to use his power under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to object to any law that is discriminatory, citing new laws in Texas, South Carolina and Florida.

That section, however, only applies to 16 states that have a well-documented history of voter discrimination, mostly in the South. The new Republican effort is far broader than that group of states, and may require the Justice Department to use other tools to fight it. Though Mr. Holder did not mention it, Section 2 of the act allows the government to take legal action anywhere against measures that are intentionally discriminatory on the basis of race or that have a clear racially disparate impact. The Justice Department can also intervene in private lawsuits that allege violations of the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, such as the one filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union against Wisconsin.

Those cases are harder to make, particularly given the 2008 Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana’s voter ID law, but Mr. Holder at least suggested that his department would now actively be looking for patterns of discrimination in the new laws. As he noted, race continues to preoccupy many state officials. The Justice Department recently had to object to a redistricting plan in an eastern Louisiana parish that was based on a meeting that excluded black officeholders. It also intervened against the Republican redistricting plan in Texas, which created no new Hispanic districts despite a huge influx of new Hispanic residents. (That case is going to the Supreme Court.)

Mr. Holder effectively demolished the phony voter-fraud excuse used by Republicans supporting these laws, pointing that such fraud happens far too infrequently to justify this kind of discrimination. And he called on citizens of every state to demand a voter registration system that is not cumbersome, allowing anyone eligible to exercise what Lyndon Johnson called “the basic right, without which all others are meaningless.”

His department faces a concerted opposition of political opportunists who believe making it easy to vote harms their interests. Mr. Holder’s speech was a strong first step, as long as it is backed up by the full power of the law.

    Holder Speaks Up for Voting Rights, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/opinion/holder-speaks-up-for-voting-rights.html

With Port Actions,

Occupy Oakland Tests Labor Leaders

December 13, 2011
The New York Times
By MALIA WOLLAN and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

OAKLAND, Calif. — In most cities, the Occupy movement has been thrown on the defensive, struggling to regroup and plan new protests after being evicted from its encampments by the police.

Not in Oakland.

Long the most militant Occupy branch, Occupy Oakland has continued to push the movement’s campaign against the wealthiest 1 percent even after losing its perch in front of City Hall. It spearheaded a one-day action on Monday in which thousands of protesters rallied at West Coast ports from San Diego to Anchorage, effectively closing the Ports of Portland and Longview, Wash., and largely shutting the Port of Oakland.

In the process, Occupy Oakland has cast itself as the true champion of America’s workers, creating a potentially troublesome rift with the Occupy movement’s sometime allies in organized labor.

Several labor leaders criticized the plan to disrupt the ports, which cost many longshoremen and truck drivers a day’s pay. And union officials were irked by Occupy Oakland’s claim that it was advancing the cause of port workers even though several unions opposed the protests.

For example, several days before the disruptions, Robert McEllrath, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, issued a statement warning: “Support is one thing. Organizing from outside groups attempting to co-opt our struggle in order to advance a broader agenda is quite another.”

Organizers at Occupy Oakland shrugged off the criticism, saying many union leaders are afraid of bold action. The Occupy movement, they say, is doing more for working people than some unions and union leaders are.

“You can’t co-opt labor issues if you are in the working class,” said Boots Riley, 40, a rap musician with the Coup who helped plan the port shutdown. “The organizers of this movement are the working class, and these are issues that belong to the working class. No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.”

Occupy Oakland led the push to shut West Coast ports, holding conference calls two or three times a week with as many as 40 Occupy protesters in cities from San Diego to Seattle to plan and coordinate the disruptions. Occupy Oakland also sent $1,000 each to four other West Coast Occupy groups to help finance outreach and organizing for the port shutdowns.

The Oakland protesters also made regular visits to the longshore union’s hiring hall in San Francisco to gather support from rank-and-file workers. They printed 50,000 fliers about the protest and went to the Oakland port, one of the nation’s busiest, to distribute them and talk to nonunion truck drivers.

“The Occupy movement is a union for the 99 percent, and certainly for the 89 percent of working people who are not in unions,” said Barucha Peller, 28, an unemployed writer who helped plan and rally support for the port shutdown.

The Occupy strategists said they were carrying on the struggle of longshore workers at the Longview port, who have been pressing EGT, a terminal operator, to hire longshoremen instead of workers from another union. A court had imposed a strict injunction against illegal activity by the longshore union after some members had engaged in violent protests.

But the Occupy planners also knew that they had chosen a target that was symbolic of multinational corporations, including the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which owns a major interest in a company that operates many port terminals. They also figured that disrupting ports was relatively easy and likely to bring them lots of attention.

While the protests drew support from some port workers, others were dismayed by the disruptions.

“They’re taking money out of my pocket,” said Lee Ranaldson, 63, a nonunion trucker from Cleveland who said he had been blocked from dropping off his cargo of refrigerated meat for more than 12 hours. “Who are the leaders of this thing and what do they want?”

Some union leaders noted wryly that the Occupy movement — after gratefully accepting major donations of money, food, sleeping bags and winter clothing from labor unions — had repeatedly warned unions not to seek to co-opt them.

With the port effort, the Occupy movement suddenly seemed to be engineering protests and work stoppages on its own, essentially co-opting the unions’ cause instead of working with them.

While praising the Occupy movement’s goal of helping the 99 percent, Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, faulted the protesters’ tactics, saying, “I don’t know how you call a strike without involving the union or the workers.”

But the Occupy activists said unions were too timid about pushing the interests of workers.

“The 1 percent has been able to write and pass labor laws that are designed to restrict the amount of action that can legally be taken by a union. Most union officials today refuse to challenge those laws,” Occupy organizers wrote on a Web site explaining the port shutdown. “It is the responsibility of rank-and-file workers and their allies to escalate the labor struggle. Occupy can spearhead this movement.”

Some Occupy participants and labor experts asserted that the longshore union, which they said feared endorsing the protests because of the court injunction and pending contracts, was not really opposed to the port disruptions and was happy to see the Occupy protesters carry on its fight.

“It reminds me of what John L. Lewis, the great mine workers’ leader, did when the mine workers engaged in a wildcat strike,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “He’d give a wink and a nod.”

Craig Merrilees, a spokesman for the longshore union, denied there was any such tacit approval and said his union resented the Occupy organizers’ assertions that the union was craven.

“It’s silly to lecture the I.L.W.U. about being overcautious when the members of this union have always been willing to be courageous and put their bodies on the line,” he said.

 

Malia Wollan reported from Oakland,

and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

    With Port Actions, Occupy Oakland Tests Labor Leaders, NYT, 13.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/us/occupy-oakland-angers-labor-leaders.html

Occupy Video Showcases Live Streaming

December 11, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER PRESTON

Brad Hunstable started Ustream, an online video platform, with a fellow West Point graduate back in 2007 to help American troops overseas communicate with multiple friends and family members at the same time. It was not long before its uses extended well beyond the military.

Celebrities, politicians and organizers of events like rock concerts and high school football games soon discovered that streaming services offered by Ustream and the other leading start-up provider, Livestream, could help expand their audience online. Now, the huge amount of user-generated live video produced by the Occupy Wall Street movement has delivered what could be a watershed moment for these companies, potentially helping them gain the audience needed to become viable businesses.

With cellphones, iPads and video cameras affixed to laptops, Occupy participants showed that almost anyone could broadcast live news online. In addition, they could help build an audience for their video by inviting people to talk about what they were seeing.

“It is a very immersive, interactive experience,” Mr. Hunstable said. “Something is changing when a person with a cellphone video camera can command an audience around the world.”

Max Haot, the chief executive and a co-founder of Livestream, recalls getting the cold shoulder when he was pursuing investors three years ago. Some of them flatly dismissed the idea of live streaming, he said, telling him online users preferred to watch video on their schedule, not at appointed times.

“The point that everyone missed was that people are not watching live streaming the way they watch a four-minute video on YouTube,” said Mr. Haot, whose New York-based company now has about 120 employees around the world. “They are watching so that they can be there and connect with an event.”

A live chat window runs alongside the video player on both Livestream and Ustream, giving users an opportunity not only to watch events as they unfold but comment on them, too. Since the first Occupy protest in Lower Manhattan last September, people from all over the globe have jumped into the conversation.

As a result, traffic to the sites has soared, and so has the amount of time spent viewing videos. For example, viewing time in the United States on Livestream totaled 411 million minutes in October, up from 270 million minutes in July, according to Dan Piech, product manager for video and social media at comScore, the analytics measuring firm.

Ustream is now also used by big brands like MTV and CBS News, which turned to its Ustream channel last Thursday to stream live video about the Virginia Tech shooting from its local CBS television affiliate.

On Ustream, Mr. Hunstable said, there are now about 700 Occupy-related channels, with 70 percent of the live streaming content created on mobile phones and about 89 percent of it viewed on mobile phones. Traffic to the site has increased by 14 percent since the movement began producing content.

The number of Occupy channels on Livestream is now about 120. Among them is the Globalrevolution.tv channel. It operates out of a makeshift television studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and is considered the main channel for the movement.

Vlad Teichberg, 39, a former derivatives trader on Wall Street, is among the volunteers who aggregates live streams from the movement’s activities around the world. He first started live streaming from the protests in Madrid last May and then began using the technology to stream live video from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and from various other protest sites. “We will cover what the mainstream media will not cover and then propagate it using social media,” he said.

This week the channel delivered live coverage from several Occupy-related events around the country, including a march in Washington and a campaign to fight foreclosures in Los Angeles and New York. In Boston, Occupy organizers positioned 15 smartphones to help deliver live video from their tent city as a way for people to closely monitor the police who have been trying to move the protesters.

Both Livestream and Ustream officials say they simply operate platforms and are not supporting the movements. They have made some adjustments on their platforms and provided some extra resources to accommodate Occupy movement video.

Mr. Haot removed advertising from the Occupy channels after some brands complained that they did not want their ads appearing next to streaming video of protesters. Ustream lent more sophisticated video equipment to two citizen journalists, Tim Pool in New York and Spencer Mills in Oakland, Calif., after they consistently delivered high-quality streams. Neither of them is a trained journalist or highly skilled videographer, but they each managed to quickly build highly engaged audiences. Mr. Pool’s channel has had more than 874,000 views since September and has had as many as 28,000 live viewers at a time.

Despite increased volume and popularity, live streaming services face considerable challenges before becoming highly successful enterprises, analysts say.

“No question that what has been taking place in the world has done quite a bit to propel the adoption of services on platforms like Ustream and Livestream,” said Dan Rayburn, principal analyst for Frost & Sullivan and executive vice president of StreamingMedia.com. “But from an investor’s standpoint, there are a lot of questions to be asked.”

Mr. Rayburn said that one of the most important questions for live streaming services was whether they would be able to take their platforms to the next level and manage costs in an ever-changing landscape that includes YouTube, which has not yet fully embraced live streaming. “Can they scale the business fast enough while reducing their internal costs so they can make money?” he asked.

Mr. Haot said he expected that revenue for Livestream would be about $25 million in 2012, double the amount generated this year. Mr. Hunstable predicted that Ustream’s revenue, which he described as being under $20 million this year, would also double in 2012. Both sites derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising. They also offer premium channels without advertising for monthly fees and full production services if a brand or an event organizer wants a skilled team to stream an event or a red-carpet premiere.

Livestream and Ustream both said that they were looking at adding new features in the coming weeks aimed at increasing traffic, content and revenue. But they also said they recognized that competition could come anytime from new start-ups or from YouTube, which has an average of 161 million views monthly in the United States, according to comScore. In April, YouTube made video live streaming available to a limited number of participants in its partners program.

“YouTube is the behemoth in the space,” said Mr. Piech, the product manager for comScore. “No one else comes close to YouTube’s audience. If YouTube wanted to open a live streaming service, they could gain a significantly larger audience.”

 

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

    Occupy Video Showcases Live Streaming, NYT, 11.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/business/media/
    occupy-movement-shows-potential-of-live-online-video.html

Goodbye to ‘Gays, Guns & God’

December 8, 2011
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

How do you praise the sanctity of traditional heterosexual marriage when the best-known nuptials of the year, between a Kardashian and a basketball player, lasted all of 72 days? Or, for that matter, when a possible Republican nominee for president, Newt Gingrich, cares so much about marriage that he’s tried it three times?

You don’t. The above mockeries of marriage are just the latest reasons one of the most potent wedge issues of American politics — the banner of gays, guns and God — will have little impact next year.

This trio is usually trotted out in big swaths of the West, in rural or swing districts and in Southern states at the cusp of the Bible Belt. The proverbial three G’s was the explanation in Thomas Frank’s entertaining book “What’s the Matter With Kansas” for why poor, powerless whites would vote for a party that promises nothing but tax cuts for the rich.

It’s misleading to think people will vote against their economic interests simply because a candidate doesn’t mouth the same pieties as them as they do. But the cultural cudgel works to a point. I’ve certainly seen the three G’s launched late in a campaign, to great effect. Jim Inhofe won a Senate seat in Oklahoma in 1994 using the three G’s as an overt slogan.

At the same time, I’ve watched smart politicians, like Montana’s two-term Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, blunt the attack by showing off their guns and waving away the God and gay questions as none-of-your-business intrusions.

But this year I think we’ve reached a tipping point on these heartless perennials. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, political sophisticates were stunned by a national exit poll in which 22 percent of voters picked “moral issues” from a list of things that mattered most — more than any other concern. This was heralded as the high-water triumph for evangelicals.

Later analysis showed that the phrase “moral issues” was being used rather broadly by voters, from concern about character to worry over poverty. It was a catch-all. Still, the ranking of moral issues as the top reason to pick a president came as a surprise.

Now look at this week’s New York Times/CBS News Poll of likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa, about as conservative a cohort of voters as anywhere in the country. Iowa, for Republicans, is where gays, guns and God will grow in political fields long after corn is no longer planted for ethanol subsidies.

Topping the list of voter concerns was the economy and jobs — picked by 40 percent of respondents, followed by the budget deficit at 23 percent. Social issues came in a distant third, with 9 percent. And the candidate who polled highest as the one who “most represents the values you try to live by,” Michele Bachmann, has nothing to show for that rating in the overall race, where she is in fifth place.

But the decline of the three G’s hasn’t stopped a few of the dead-enders in the Republican field from raising the flag. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, last seen trying to find a verb to follow “oops,” is out this week with a very specific culture-war ad in Iowa, vowing to end “Obama’s war on religion,” whatever that is.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” says Perry, in a folksy drawl. “But you don’t need to be in a pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” The surprise here is that he actually completed several sentences, though it may have required a number of takes.

Perry and Rick Santorum, another badly wounded culture warrior, blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week for saying that the United States would assist human rights groups fighting for tolerance in countries where people have been imprisoned, and even killed, for their sexual orientation.

“This administration’s war on traditional values must stop,” said Perry, siding, apparently, with mullahs living in caves.

This is Perry’s last gasp; in desperation, he shows how this particular balloon has run out of hot air. Poll after poll has found that Americans now overwhelmingly favor letting gays serve openly in the military — a sentiment backed even by a sizable majority of Republicans.

The gay marriage issue is moving in the same direction. Earlier this year, Gallup reported that, for the first time in its tracking of the issue, a majority of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal. In 1996, only 27 percent felt that way.

Which brings us to guns. President Obama has done nothing to curb gun use. If anything, he’s expanded gun rights. There are probably a dozen Democrats in Congress from the West who know more about guns than Mitt Romney or Professor Newt Gingrich. That dog, as they say, will not hunt — not this year.

The irony is that two of the G’s could actually hurt Republicans in 2012. Conservative orthodoxy is badly out of step with emerging majority support for full citizenship rights of gays. And with religion, some Republicans have already made an issue of Romney’s Mormonism, and Gingrich’s switch to Roman Catholicism. In Gingrich’s case, questions have been raised about how a multiple-married man could win the favor of high-ranking Catholic clerics who usually look askance at people who ditch their wives.

Do we dare expect these two fine men to be the ones, at long last, to bring an end to the gays, guns and God wedge issue, even if it’s by accident?

    Goodbye to ‘Gays, Guns & God’, NYT, 8.12.2011,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/goodbye-to-gays-guns-god/

Obama in Osawatomie

December 6, 2011
The New York Times

After months of Republican candidates offering a cascade of bad ideas about the economy, President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Tuesday came as a relief. He made it clear that he was finally prepared to contest the election on the issues of income inequality and the obligation of both government and the private sector to enlarge the nation’s shrinking middle class.

The economic downturn, combined with ideological gridlock, has created a “make-or-break moment” for the middle class and for those trying to enter it, he said. Mr. Obama correctly framed the choice for voters: The country can return to policies that stacked the deck for the wealthy and left everyone else to fend for themselves, creating what he called “you’re on your own economics.” Or elected officials can step in to keep competition fair and ensure the government has enough money to protect the vulnerable and invest in education and research.

The speech felt an awfully long time in coming, but it was the most potent blow the president has struck against the economic theory at the core of every Republican presidential candidacy and dear to the party’s leaders in Congress. The notion that the market will take care of all problems if taxes are kept low and regulations are minimized may look great on a bumper sticker, but, he said: “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” Not before the Great Depression, not in the ’80s, and not in the last decade.

The president repeated his calls for the rich to pay higher taxes, for financial institutions to be more closely regulated and for education to become a national mission. What set this speech apart was the newly forceful explanation of why those policies are necessary. Incomes of the top 1 percent, he noted, have more than doubled in the last decade while the average income has fallen by 6 percent.

The chances of a poor child making it into the middle class have severely diminished since World War II, he said. That, he said, “flies in the face of everything that we stand for.”

It is rare for a president to be so explicit about a national income gap, but it is hardly “un-American” to think about it, as Newt Gingrich said recently. In fact, it is a pressing issue that goes back more than a century. Mr. Obama spoke in the same town where Theodore Roosevelt issued his call for a square deal in 1910. In demanding “a new nationalism,” Roosevelt supported strong government oversight of business, a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,” an inheritance tax and the primacy of labor over capital. For that, he was called a socialist and worse, as Mr. Obama observed, having endured the same.

Mr. Obama was late to Roosevelt’s level of passion and action on behalf of the middle class and the poor, having missed several opportunities to make the tax burden more fair and demand real action on the housing crisis from the big banks that he excoriated so effectively in his speech.

But he has fought energetically for a realistic plan to put Americans back to work and has been stymied at every step by Republicans. That seems to have burned away his old urge to conciliate and compromise, and he is now fully engaged against the philosophy of his opponents.

Tuesday’s speech, in fact, seemed expressly designed to counter Mitt Romney’s argument that business, unfettered, will easily restore American jobs and prosperity. Teddy Roosevelt knew better 101 years ago, and it was gratifying to hear his fire reflected by President Obama.

    Obama in Osawatomie, NYT, 6.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/opinion/president-obama-in-osawatomie.html

Obama Strikes Populist Chord

With Speech on G.O.P. Turf

December 6, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

OSAWATOMIE, Kan. — Laying out a populist argument for his re-election next year, President Obama ventured into the conservative heartland on Tuesday to deliver his most pointed appeal yet for a strong governmental role through tax and regulation to level the economic playing field.

“This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share and when everyone plays by the same rules,” Mr. Obama said in an address that sought to tie his economic differences with Republicans into an overarching message.

Infusing his speech with the moralistic language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Mr. Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class and, “gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try.”

“This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class,” Mr. Obama told the crowd packed into the gym at Osawatomie High School.

“At stake,” he said, “is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”

Mr. Obama purposefully chose this hardscrabble town of 4,500 people, about 50 miles south of Kansas City, Kan., where Theodore Roosevelt once laid out the progressive platform he called “the New Nationalism” to put forth his case for a payroll tax cut and his broader arguments against the Republican economic agenda in what his aides hoped would be viewed as a defining speech.

Though it was lacking in specific new policy prescriptions, the hourlong speech, and the days of buildup that preceded it, marked the president’s starkest attack on what he described as the “breathtaking greed” that contributed to the economic turmoil still reverberating around the nation. At one point, he noted that the average income of the top 1 percent — adopting the marker that has been the focus of the Occupy movement — has gone up by more than 250 percent, to $1.2 million a year.

The new tack reflected a decision by the White House and the president’s campaign aides that — with the economic recovery still lagging and Republicans in Congress continuing to oppose the president’s jobs proposals — the best course for Mr. Obama is to try to present himself as the defender of working-class Americans and Republicans as defenders of a small elite.

Republicans, though, portrayed the visit to Osawatomie (pronounced oh-suh-WAHT-ah-mee) as an effort by the president to paper over his failed stewardship of the national economy. Though unemployment levels dropped to 8.6 percent last month, they remain higher than the level at which any president has been re-elected since the Great Depression.

Mitt Romney, one of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, dismissed the president’s address. “I thought, ‘In what way is he like Teddy Roosevelt?’ ” Mr. Romney said. “Teddy Roosevelt founded the Bull Moose Party. One of those words applies when the president talks about how he’s helped the economy.”

The trip was Mr. Obama’s third out of Washington in as many weeks to press for passage of the payroll tax break, which would reduce the how much employees pay for Social Security to 3.1 percent from the already reduced level of 4.2 percent. Under the Democratic proposal, which Republicans have blocked, the cut that would go to most working Americans would be offset in the budget by a 1. 9 percent surtax on those with modified adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million. If Congress takes no action, the tax will revert back to 6.2 percent next month.

In Washington, the two parties remained at an impasse in their efforts to write legislation to extend the tax cut, with Senate Republicans rejecting the latest Democratic proposal and House Republicans still writing their own plan.

Though the earlier speeches on the payroll tax took place in swing states, the fact that the president brought the message to one of the most reliably Republican states in the country shows that he and his party are increasingly confident that they have found a message that resonates with voters.

This speech, however, was cast in broad historical terms, with Mr. Obama declaring that that after a century of struggle to build it, the middle class has been steadily eroded, even before the current economic turmoil, by Republican policies intended to reduce the size and scope of government — ranging from tax cuts for the wealthy to deregulation of Wall Street.

“Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success,” he said. “Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before. But everyone else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t — and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt.”

Mr. Obama sought to pre-empt a Republican response that he was engaging in class warfare. “This isn’t about class warfare,” he said. “This is about the nation’s welfare.”

The visit was unusual for its setting in a state that he lost decisively despite his own family roots — his mother was born in Kansas. The vast majority of his visits as president have been to swing states like Pennsylvania that are expected to play an important role in next year’s election. But it was here, 101 years ago, that Theodore Roosevelt laid the intellectual framework for his unsuccessful bid for a third term after leaving the Republican party. That speech, which Mr. Obama referred to repeatedly, touched on many of the same themes — often in similar language — like concentration of wealth and the need for government to ensure a level playing field. Central to progress, Mr. Roosevelt said, was the conflict between “the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.”

Mr. Obama, to laughter from those familiar with attacks against him, noted: “For this, Roosevelt was called a radical, he was called a socialist, even a communist.”

After the speech, one woman in the audience, Debra Harrison said the president put voice to her concerns about this community, which has been eroded by job losses and depopulation.

“We’re doing what the middle class has always done in this country,” said Ms. Harrison, 51, who works at a nearby bank, shaking her head. “We work hard. We teach our kids to work hard. But it’s very hard for us to keep our heads above water these days. And it’s even harder for our kids.”

 

Helene Cooper and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

    Obama Strikes Populist Chord With Speech on G.O.P. Turf, NYT, 6.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/us/politics/
    obama-strikes-populist-chord-with-speech-in-heartland.html

Text: Obama’s Speech in Kansas

December 6, 2011
The New York Times


Following is a text of President Obama’s prepared remarks in Osawatomie, Kan.,
as released by the White House on Tuesday:

Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking a few of the folks who’ve joined us today. We’ve got the mayor of Osawatomie, Phil Dudley; your superintendent, Gary French; the principal of Osawatomie High, Doug Chisam. And I’ve brought your former governor, who’s now doing an outstanding job as our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.

It is great to be back in the state of Kansas. As many of you know, I’ve got roots here. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Obamas of Osawatomie. Actually, I like to say that I got my name from my father, but I got my accent – and my values – from my mother. She was born in Wichita. Her mother grew up in Augusta. And her father was from El Dorado. So my Kansas roots run deep.

My grandparents served during World War II — he as a soldier in Patton’s Army, she as a worker on a bomber assembly line. Together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over a Depression and fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, where you came from, or how you started out.

These values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy the world has ever known. It was here, in America, that the most productive workers and innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth, and every American shared in that pride and success — from those in executive suites to middle management to those on the factory floor. If you gave it your all, you’d take enough home to raise your family, send your kids to school, have your health care covered, and put a little away for retirement.

Today, we are still home to the world’s most productive workers and innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefitted from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before. But everyone else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t – and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.

For many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over the harsh realities of this new economy. But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets – and huge bonuses – made with other people’s money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs, homes, and the basic security of millions – innocent, hard-working Americans who had met their responsibilities, but were still left holding the bag.

Ever since, there has been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity; balance and fairness. Throughout the country, it has sparked protests and political movements – from the Tea Party to the people who have been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. It’s left Washington in a near-constant state of gridlock. And it’s been the topic of heated and sometimes colorful discussion among the men and women who are running for president.

But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.

Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

Well, I’m here to say they are wrong. I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.

You see, this isn’t the first time America has faced this choice. At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress.

Theodore Roosevelt disagreed. He was the Republican son of a wealthy family. He praised what the titans of industry had done to create jobs and grow the economy. He believed then what we know is true today: that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It’s led to a prosperity and standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world.

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can. It only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open, and honest. And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for customers with better services and better prices. And today, they still must. He fought to make sure businesses couldn’t profit by exploiting children, or selling food or medicine that wasn’t safe. And today, they still can’t.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here, to Osawatomie, and laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. “Our country,” he said, “…means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy…of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

For this, Roosevelt was called a radical, a socialist, even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight hour work day and a minimum wage for women; insurance for the unemployed, the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.

Today, over one hundred years later, our economy has gone through another transformation. Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world. And many of you know firsthand the painful disruptions this has caused for a lot of Americans.

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where the workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. These changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the internet. Today, even higher-skilled jobs like accountants and middle management can be outsourced to countries like China and India. And if you’re someone whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don’t have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages and benefits – especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, they argue, that’s the price of liberty.

It’s a simple theory – one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.

Remember that in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class – things like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and Social Security.

Remember that in those years, thanks to some of the same folks who are running Congress now, we had weak regulation and little oversight, and what did that get us? Insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity, and denied care to the patients who were sick. Mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford. A financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy.

We simply cannot return to this brand of your-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country. We know that it doesn’t result in a strong economy. It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and its future. It doesn’t result in a prosperity that trickles down. It results in a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.

Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top one percent has gone up by more than 250%, to $1.2 million per year. For the top one hundredth of one percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about six percent.

This kind of inequality – a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression – hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity – that’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them – that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.

More fundamentally, this kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try. We tell people that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, hard work can get you into the middle class; and that your children will have the chance to do even better than you. That’s why immigrants from around the world flocked to our shores.

And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. A few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance fell to around 40%. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a 1 in 3 chance of making it to the middle class.

It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.

Fortunately, that’s not a future we have to accept. Because there’s another view about how we build a strong middle class in this country – a view that’s truer to our history; a vision that’s been embraced by people of both parties for more than two hundred years.

It’s not a view that we should somehow turn back technology or put up walls around America. It’s not a view that says we should punish profit or success or pretend that government knows how to fix all society’s problems. It’s a view that says in America, we are greater together – when everyone engages in fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy?

It starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is, we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages or pollute as much as they want. That’s a race to the bottom that we can’t win – and shouldn’t want to win. Those countries don’t have a strong middle-class. They don’t have our standard of living.

The race we want to win – the race we can win – is a race to the top; the race for good jobs that pay well and offer middle-class security. Businesses will create those jobs in countries with the highest-skilled, highest-educated workers; the most advanced transportation and communication; the strongest commitment to research and technology.

The world is shifting to an innovation economy. And no one does innovation better than America. No one has better colleges and universities. No one has a greater diversity of talent and ingenuity. No one’s workers or entrepreneurs are more driven or daring. The things that have always been our strengths match up perfectly with the demands of this moment.

But we need to meet the moment. We need to up our game. And we need to remember that we can only do that together.

It starts by making education a national mission – government and businesses; parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. Their income is twice as high as those who don’t have a high school diploma. We shouldn’t be laying off good teachers right now – we should be hiring them. We shouldn’t be expecting less of our schools – we should be demanding more. We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college – we should be a country where everyone has the chance to go.

In today’s innovation economy, we also need a world-class commitment to science, research, and the next generation of high-tech manufacturing. Our factories and their workers shouldn’t be idle. We should be giving people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges, so they can learn to make wind turbines and semiconductors and high-powered batteries. And by the way – if we don’t have an economy built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best and brightest won’t all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance. Because if we want an economy that’s built to last, we need more of those young people in science and engineering. This country shouldn’t be known for bad debt and phony profits. We should be known for creating and selling products all over the world that are stamped with three proud words: Made in America.

Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world. That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools – all the things other countries are already doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.

Yes, businesses, not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we have always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed. Historically, that hasn’t been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt worked with Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II, including my grandfather, the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son of Kansas, who started the interstate highway system and doubled-down on science and research to stay ahead of the Soviets.

Of course, those productive investments cost money. And so we’ve also paid for these investments by asking everyone to do their fair share. If we had unlimited resources, no one would ever have to pay any taxes and we’d never have to cut any spending. But we don’t have unlimited resources. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices.

Today that choice is very clear. To reduce our deficit, I’ve already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law, and proposed trillions more – including reforms that would lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

But in order to actually close the deficit and get our fiscal house in order, we have to decide what our priorities are. Most immediately, we need to extend a payroll tax cut that’s set to expire at the end of this month. If we don’t do that, 160 million Americans will see their taxes go up by an average of $1,000, and it would badly weaken our recovery.

But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math.

So far, most of the Republicans in Washington have refused, under any circumstances, to ask the wealthiest Americans to go the same tax rates they were paying when Bill Clinton was president.

Now, keep in mind, when President Clinton first proposed these tax increases, folks in Congress predicted they would kill jobs and lead to another recession. Instead, our economy created nearly 23 million jobs and we eliminated the deficit. Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century. This isn’t like in the early 50s, when the top tax rate was over 90%, or even the early 80s, when it was about 70%. Under President Clinton, the top rate was only about 39%. Today, thanks to loopholes and shelters, a quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1%. One percent.

This is the height of unfairness. It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay a higher tax rate than somebody pulling in $50 million. It is wrong for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. And he agrees with me. So do most Americans – Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. And I know that many of our wealthiest citizens would agree to contribute a little more if it meant reducing the deficit and strengthening the economy that made their success possible.

This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare. It’s about making choices that benefit not just the people who’ve done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get to the middle class, and the economy as a whole.

Finally, a strong middle class can only exist in an economy where everyone plays by the same rules, from Wall Street to Main Street. As infuriating as it was for all of us, we rescued our major banks from collapse, not only because a full blown financial meltdown would have sent us into a second Depression, but because we need a strong, healthy financial sector in this country.

But part of the deal was that we would not go back to business as usual. That’s why last year we put in place new rules of the road that refocus the financial sector on this core purpose: getting capital to the entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and financing to millions of families who want to buy a home or send their kids to college. We’re not all the way there yet, and the banks are fighting us every inch of the way. But already, some of these reforms are being implemented. If you’re a big bank or risky financial institution, you’ll have to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail, so that taxpayers are never again on the hook for Wall Street’s mistakes. There are also limits on the size of banks and new abilities for regulators to dismantle a firm that goes under. The new law bans banks from making risky bets with their customers’ deposits, and takes away big bonuses and paydays from failed CEOs, while giving shareholders a say on executive salaries.

All that is being put in place as we speak. Now, unless you’re a financial institution whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers, or making risky bets that could damage the entire economy, you have nothing to fear from these new rules. My grandmother worked as a banker for most of her life, and I know that the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals want to do right by their customers. They want to have rules in place that don’t put them at a disadvantage for doing the right thing. And yet, Republicans in Congress are already fighting as hard as they can to make sure these rules aren’t enforced.

I’ll give you one example. For the first time in history, the reform we passed puts in place a consumer watchdog who is charged with protecting everyday Americans from being taken advantage of by mortgage lenders, payday lenders or debt collectors. The man we nominated for the post, Richard Cordray, is a former Attorney General of Ohio who has the support of most Attorneys General, both Democrat and Republican, throughout the country.

But the Republicans in the Senate refuse to let him do his job. Why? Does anyone here think the problem that led to our financial crisis was too much oversight of mortgage lenders or debt collectors? Of course not. Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student, or a senior citizen, or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can’t afford – something that happens all the time. Financial institutions have plenty of lobbyists looking out for their interests. Consumers deserve to have someone whose job it is to look out for them. I intend to make sure they do, and I will veto any effort to delay, defund, or dismantle the new rules we put in place.

We shouldn’t be weakening oversight and accountability. We should be strengthening them. Here’s another example. Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for being a repeat offender. No more. I’ll be calling for legislation that makes these penalties count – so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business.

The fact is, this crisis has left a deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit. At minimum, they should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home. We’re going to keep pushing them to provide more time for unemployed homeowners to look for work without having to worry about immediately losing their house. The big banks should increase access to refinancing opportunities to borrowers who have yet to benefit from historically low interest rates. And they should recognize that precisely because these steps are in the interest of middle-class families and the broader economy, they will also be in the banks’ own long-term financial interest.

Investing in things like education that give everybody a chance to succeed. A tax code that makes sure everybody pays their fair share. And laws that make sure everybody follows the rules. That’s what will transform our economy. That’s what will grow our middle class again. In the end, rebuilding this economy based on fair play, a fair shot, and a fair share will require all of us to see the stake we have in each other’s success. And it will require all of us to take some responsibility to that success.

It will require parents to get more involved in their children’s education, students to study harder, and some workers to start studying all over again. It will require greater responsibility from homeowners to not take out mortgages they can’t afford, and remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

It will require those of us in public service to make government more efficient, effective, and responsive to people’s needs. That’s why we’re cutting programs we don’t need, to pay for those we do. That’s why we’ve made hundreds of regulatory reforms that will save businesses billions of dollars. That’s why we’re not just throwing money at education, but challenging schools to come up with the most innovative reforms and the best results.

And it will require American business leaders to understand that their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel put it best: “There’s another obligation I feel personally,” he said, “given that everything I’ve achieved in my career and a lot of what Intel has achieved…were made possible by a climate of democracy, an economic climate and investment climate provided by…the United States.”

This broader obligation can take different forms. At a time when the cost of hiring workers in China is rising rapidly, it should mean more CEOs deciding that it’s time to bring jobs back to the United States – not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s good for the country that made their business and their personal success possible.

I think about the Big Three Auto companies who, during recent negotiations, agreed to create more jobs and cars in America; who decided to give bonuses, not just to their executives, but to all their employees – so that everyone was invested in the company’s success.

I think about a company based in Warroad, Minnesota called Marvin Windows and Doors. During the recession, Marvin’s competitors closed dozens of plants and let go hundreds of workers. But Marvin didn’t lay off a single one of their four thousand or so employees. In fact, they’ve only laid off workers once in over a hundred years. Mr. Marvin’s grandfather even kept his eight employees during the Depression.

When times get tough, the workers agree to give up some perks and pay, and so do the owners. As one owner said, “You can’t grow if you’re cutting your lifeblood – and that’s the skills and experience your workforce delivers.” For the CEO, it’s about the community: “These are people we went to school with,” he said. “We go to church with them. We see them in the same restaurant. Indeed, a lot of us have married local girls and boys. We could be anywhere. But we are in Warroad.”

That’s how America was built. That’s why we’re the greatest nation on Earth. That’s what our greatest companies understand. Our success has never just been about survival of the fittest. It’s been about building a nation where we’re all better off. We pull together, we pitch in, and we do our part, believing that hard work will pay off; that responsibility will be rewarded; and that our children will inherit a nation where those values live on.

And it is that belief that rallied thousands of Americans to Osawatomie – maybe even some of your ancestors – on a rain-soaked day more than a century ago. By train, by wagon, on buggy, bicycle, and foot, they came to hear the vision of a man who loved this country, and was determined to perfect it.

“We are all Americans,” Teddy Roosevelt told them that day. “Our common interests are as broad as the continent.” In the final years of his life, Roosevelt took that same message all across this country, from tiny Osawatomie to the heart of New York City, believing that no matter where he went, or who he was talking to, all would benefit from a country in which everyone gets a fair chance.

Well into our third century as a nation, we have grown and changed in many ways since Roosevelt’s time. The world is faster. The playing field is larger. The challenges are more complex.

But what hasn’t changed – what can never change – are the values that got us this far. We still have a stake in each other’s success. We still believe that this should be a place where you can make it if you try. And we still believe, in the words of the man who called for a New Nationalism all those years ago, “The fundamental rule in our national life – the rule which underlies all others – is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”

I believe America is on its way up. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

    Text: Obama’s Speech in Kansas, NYT, 6.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/us/politics/text-obamas-speech-in-kansas.html

31 Are Arrested at Occupy D.C. Building Site

December 4, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON — Police arrested 31 people on Sunday night and tore down a barnlike building Occupy D.C. protesters began to erect that morning in a park two blocks from the White House where they have been camping out. The episode, in which police officers plucked some protesters from the building’s rafters with a cherry picker or coaxed them to jump off it onto an inflated cushion, lasted into the evening.

Ann Wilcox, an observer from the National Lawyers Guild who was in touch with both sides, said that the police had made clear in advance that protesters in and around the structure would be arrested.

As the police worked, the protesters chanted their defiance: “We are stronger than your trucks and your horses and your riot gear and your orders.”

Despite some disputes and a few confrontations, the Occupy D.C. protesters have had a relatively smooth relationship with the police, without the clashes that have occurred in other cities when officers have moved in to carry out mass evictions. But the erection of the structure and the police response to it appeared likely to escalate tensions. Several protesters said the police had moved in a little after noon, using horses to force people back.

As the standoff continued, a few of the protesters on the roof jumped down, but others sat tight for hours, according to witnesses and the Twitter stream of @Occupy_DC. By the end of the evening, 31 people had been arrested, according to a spokesman for the United States Park Police: 15 for crossing a police line and 16 for disobeying a lawful order after the structure was declared unsafe, the spokesman said. Of those, one was charged with indecent exposure, among other things, for urinating while atop the structure.

One of the protesters landed with a flamboyant somersault on the inflated mattress. He was arrested as onlookers cheered as if he were a gymnast who had just stuck a landing. A few more protesters were then removed one at a time in the cherry picker basket. With the removal of the last protester, the occupation of the structure came to an end around 8:30 p.m. Within an hour of the last arrest, the structure was being hauled away in pieces. The police did hand back to the protesters a flag that they had flown from the peak of the roof.

United States Park Police officers in helmets and on horseback had surrounded the two-story structure in McPherson Square throughout the afternoon, pushing back protesters and using yellow tape to cordon off the area. The rest of the occupation camp was not disturbed.

One protester, standing on a park bench on a chilly but sunny afternoon to watch while holding a handwritten sign that said “People not profits,” said the police had pulled several people out of the half-built structure and arrested them. A Park Police spokesman did not return a phone call or e-mail.

Over all, the scene was orderly, and both sides seemed relaxed.

The man standing on the bench, who declined to give his name, said the structure had been put up overnight and was intended to be a general meeting space that would provide some protection from the winds. It was placed in a part of the park that had been left empty for the protesters’ meetings, known as general assemblies.

The structure, a sturdy, well-squared frame of boards and planks with the first few sheets of siding in place, appeared to have been carefully designed and deftly, if hurriedly, built. Occupy D.C. issued a statement saying the construction had been planned for a month. “The modular structure was designed by professionals ‘to code,’ ” the statement said. “It meets all health and safety requirements and is fully accessible. It is nonpermanent, has no foundations and is not tethered to the ground”

Jada Smith contributed reporting.

    31 Are Arrested at Occupy D.C. Building Site, NYT, 4.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/us/occupy-dc-stopped-from-putting-up-a-building.html

Police Clear Occupy Encampments in Two Cities

November 30, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — The police broke up large Occupy encampments in Los Angeles and Philadelphia early on Wednesday, arresting hundreds of protesters who had been camped out for the past two months.

Around 12:30 a.m. in Los Angeles, scores of police officers raided the Occupy camp that had been set up in a park around City Hall, leading most of the protesters to scramble out of their tents and gather in large groups in the surrounding streets.

When the raid ended several hours later, the police said they had arrested about 200 people. But as dawn approached, officers fired bean bag rounds to try to coax down some protesters who had climbed trees. It was not immediately clear if their actions caused injuries.

After much of the park around City Hall had been cleared of what had grown into a colorful — if sometimes squalid — camp of several hundred tents, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa told reporters that he was proud of the way the police had performed, in particular employing force only as a last resort.

“I said that here in L.A. we’d chart a different path, and we did,” he said. “In my life, I have never seen a more professional, restrained police force.” The police department here, with a longstanding reputation for its use of aggressive tactics, said there had been only two episodes that had involved “minor force” and that the protesters had handled themselves admirably.

Some 1,400 officers had been called in for the operation, more than for any event since the Democratic National Convention in 2000, the authorities said.

But while the police and city officials said the raid had been conducted as peacefully as possible, some protesters said they had watched officers throw demonstrators to the ground and beat back people with batons.

On Wednesday in Philadelphia, police officers raided the city’s nearly two-month-old encampment at Dilworth Plaza, adjacent to City Hall, at about 1 a.m. — more than two days after a city-imposed deadline for the protesters to leave. A police spokeswoman said that at least 50 people had been arrested and that three officers had sustained minor injuries.

City officials, which until the past week or so, had a cordial relationship with the demonstrators — even supplying them with electricity — said they wanted them to move so that the city could embark on a long-planned construction project at the plaza.

As was the case in Los Angeles, once officers arrived in force Wednesday, the protesters took to the streets. The police trailed them for hours, seeking to avoid confrontations, but eventually called in mounted units to help cordon off demonstrators.

“We followed them around Center City all night long and finally arrested some of them,” Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey told reporters.

Mr. Villaraigosa in Los Angeles had also given protesters a Monday deadline, but city officials said they had given demonstrators extra time to leave to avoid making arrests. That strategy appeared to have worked, as the camp, by Wednesday morning, had shrunk to about 250 tents, roughly half of what it was at its peak, the police said.

But the protesters who remained appeared to be far more angry and agitated then they had been two days earlier.

Richard Finefrock, 45, who said he had been living at the camp for one month, said the police had not been as careful as they might have been. Several witnesses said they carelessly dismantled tents, tearing them and breaking the poles that held them up.

“A lot of people got trampled, a lot of people got hurt, but basically they were saying, ‘You’re leaving’ and they got us out,” he said.

By 3 a.m. the area around City Hall was generally quiet — the camp had mostly been cleared and the police were focusing on a few protesters who had climbed up trees.

The park itself was a sea of collapsed tents and litter. Several protesters who had linked arms in a circle were being carried out by officers.

Mr. Villaraigosa arrived just as the last protesters were being evicted.

“We have taken a measured approach to enforcing the park closure because we have wanted to give people every opportunity to leave peacefully,” he said.

At moments, the differences in the cultures of the protesters and the police were drawn so sharply as to be comedic.

At one point, a young man told a riot police officer: “If you give me a hug, I will leave right now.”

They officer responded: “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” the protester said.

The exchange continued, but the officer walked away without giving a hug.

Another protester, who had been watching, said to the officer, “He’s offering you a hug to leave right now, how can you do that?”

Afterward, when asked his name, the man who had asked for a hug said: “My name is ‘Occupy.’ ”

 

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Brian Stelter and Timothy Williams contributed reporting from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 30, 2011

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of one of the protesters in Los Angeles. It is Richard Finefrock, not Finefrocl.

    Police Clear Occupy Encampments in Two Cities, NYT, 30.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/us/occupy-los-angeles-philadelphia-camps-cleared-by-police.html

For Occupying Protesters, Deadlines and Decisions

November 26, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER

PHILADELPHIA — Cooperative is the word usually used here to describe the relationship between the campers of Occupy Philadelphia and the city, where the constitutional right to free speech and assembly was adopted 224 years ago.

The arguments and arrests that have occurred at protests in New York and other cities have been largely absent. Mayor Michael A. Nutter even visited the encampment on its first night and pledged to work with the movement when possible.

But the limits of that cooperation are about to be tested. Following the example of other cities that have taken steps to evict the Occupy camps, Mr. Nutter, citing health and safety concerns and an imminent construction project, said the protesters must pack up and leave the steps of City Hall by Sunday evening.

“We cannot allow current conditions, including masses of tents and 24-hour-a-day camping, to continue,” Mr. Nutter said at a news conference on Friday.

Saturday, however, looked nothing like a moving day at the plaza, where protesters said the deadline had focused the local movement’s otherwise disorganized energies. “Having this kind of pressure is a good thing,” Michael Pierce, 50, a member of Occupy Philadelphia’s information working group, said between conversations with campers and the occasional lost tourist looking for the Reading Terminal Market or Rittenhouse Square.

“Without some of the struggles that the other cities have had, we’ve been sitting around, drinking coffee,” Mr. Pierce said. “This is bringing us back together.”

Amid unseasonably warm temperatures on Saturday, a sort of informal brainstorming took place before an “eviction planning meeting.”

Come Sunday, should the protesters accept the city’s proposal for a part-time occupation across the street, bringing a new phase of the movement without overnight camping? Should they stay at the site, inviting an attention-getting confrontation with the police? Or should they join a march of the homeless to a nearby rail yard? (Dennis Payne, a homeless man who was spreading the word about the march, said he wanted to move other homeless people “out of the way” of a potential clash.)

Partly joking, Mr. Pierce said he would like to see protesters move to Rittenhouse Square, one of the city’s wealthiest pockets. There, he said, “a lot more of the right kind of people would get annoyed.”

Similar conversations were taking place in Los Angeles, where Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa said Friday that protesters, who had been allowed to remain on the lawn outside City Hall for almost two months, had to disperse by 12:01 a.m. Monday. A Twitter page for the Occupy L.A. movement put out a call on Friday evening for “back up” from other Occupy-aligned groups in California.

In Philadelphia, Mr. Nutter gave the group a deadline of 5 p.m. Sunday. Dilworth Plaza, where hundreds have been staying since Oct. 6, is about to become a construction site. Mr. Nutter, adopting the movement’s language, said the project would be “built by the 99 percent for the 99 percent.”

Some of the protesters said they were aware when they set up their tents in October that the construction project — a $50 million refurbishment that will replace the concrete plaza with green space and, in the winters, an ice skating rink — might be imminent. That they chose to set up there anyway set off one of the initial disagreements within the movement.

“All along, like in other cities, there have been factions that have wanted to compromise with the authorities and factions that have wanted to be more disruptive,” said Jim MacMillan, a journalist-in-residence at Swarthmore College who has observed the occupation since the beginning.

After about a month, city officials started to speak about what they considered unsanitary conditions at the site. Police were called on Nov. 12 after a female protester said she was sexually assaulted in her tent.

There are about 250 tents still at the site, although one group, which calls itself Reasonable Solutions, pulled out recently. Will Tucker, 33, one of the organizers of Reasonable Solutions, said he felt that some of the other protesters were “looking for conflict” and refusing to communicate with the city.

Last week, the city approved a demonstration permit for Mr. Tucker’s group and rejected one submitted by a rival organization, which led to accusations that Reasonable Solutions had been co-opted. The new permit, effective Monday, allows for protests at a plaza across the street from City Hall, but only between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. No overnight activity would be allowed, though three daytime tents and an office trailer would be. Referring to overnight camping, Mr. Tucker said, “We thought that wouldn’t be logical in the wintertime anyway.”

On Saturday, protesters predicted that most people would move to the new plaza — and try to stay there overnight. Given the peaceful history of the local protests, Mr. MacMillan said he thought that some would resist the eviction on Sunday, but that the number would be small. He predicted that the police would not clear the plaza until after the 11 p.m. local newscasts.

In the meantime, said Dave Burnett, 38, a protester who is a meat clerk at a local grocery store, “it’s a great advertisement for us.”

“It’s one of those protests we don’t have to organize,” he said. “The city’s doing it for us.”

    For Occupying Protesters, Deadlines and Decisions, NYT, 26.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us/for-occupying-protesters-deadlines-and-decisions.html

Occupy L.A. to Be Evicted on Monday

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — The Occupy Los Angeles protesters have probably received a warmer reception than most of their counterparts elsewhere in the country. With vocal support from the City Council, the protesters have been allowed to remain on the lawn outside City Hall for almost two months, without any major confrontations with the police.

But even here, city leaders have finally lost patience with the Occupy encampment. Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa announced on Friday that City Hall Park would be closed at 12:01 a.m. on Monday. Those who refuse to leave may face arrest.

“The movement has awakened the country’s conscience. It has given voice to those who have not been heard,” the mayor said. “I am proud of the fact that this has been a peaceful, nonviolent protest. It has been peaceful because we decided to do things differently in Los Angeles, not stare each other down across barricades and barbed wire.”

The impending end of Occupy L.A.’s stay outside City Hall — one of the last of the movement’s major encampments — may signal the end of a phase of the protests that has been characterized by large camps in parks and public spaces.

At the Occupy L.A. encampment, protesters on Friday were considering what to do next as they prepared for the tents to come down, one way or another.

Occupy L.A. organizers said the end of the tent city would offer the movement an opportunity to evolve into what some of them called Occupy 2.0. They talked of renting office space and continuing the protests at various locations around the city. Mario Brito, 38, who also has been involved in discussions with City Hall, said several events were in the works to highlight the foreclosure crisis, one of the movement’s defining issues

“The tents are a symbol, no question about it,” Mr. Brito said. “But it’s not only about symbols. It’s about getting hard work done and building the movement. Just because we’re not at City Hall anymore doesn’t mean the Occupy movement has ended.”

Still, in a movement that has proudly declared itself leaderless, there were discussions about a variety of plans for next week. Some spoke of renting an empty warehouse where people can sleep and work, like they have in the park.

Many said they would refuse to leave the camp until the police arrested them.

Los Angeles leaders had worked hard to avoid the kinds of clashes with the police that have marked the end of Occupy encampments in other cities. City officials had engaged in talks with the protesters in hopes of persuading them to leave the park peacefully, but those negotiations ended earlier this week.

Chief Charlie Beck of the Los Angeles police said he planned to give protesters ample time to leave before officers began making arrests. “I want to make sure that I have given everyone the most reasonable opportunity possible to leave peaceably,” Chief Beck said. “I want to make sure that when we do make arrests — and we will if we have to — that it is the people who won’t go, not those who haven’t had time or can’t go.”

But some confrontation with the police may be inevitable. “They’re not moving us,” said Alejandro Recinos, 44. “I’m here. We are City Hall. We can fire our city councilmen, and then we run it.”

    Occupy L.A. to Be Evicted on Monday, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/occupy-los-angeles-to-be-evicted-from-city-hall-park.html

Protest Puts Coverage in Spotlight

November 20, 2011
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER

As police officers cleared protesters last week from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the birthplace of Occupy Wall Street, they made sure most reporters were kept blocks away, supposedly for their own protection.

But in almost every other respect, mainstream news media outlets have been put right in the middle by the movement.

Newspapers and television networks have been rebuked by media critics for treating the movement as if it were a political campaign or a sideshow — by many liberals for treating the protesters dismissively, and by conservatives, conversely, for taking the protesters too seriously.

The protesters themselves have also criticized the media — first for ostensibly ignoring the movement and then for marginalizing it.

Lacking a list of demands or recognized leaders, the Occupy movement has at times perplexed the nation’s media outlets. Press coverage, minimal in the first days of the occupation in New York, picked up after amateur video surfaced online showing a police officer using pepper spray on protesters. On several occasions, video of confrontations with the police, often filmed by the protesters, has propelled television coverage.

In the initial coverage, “I saw almost nothing that talked about our reasons for being there, and that trend has largely continued,” said Patrick Bruner, an organizer for Occupy Wall Street in New York. He said the group welcomed investigations of “our ideas, why we’re here, what we’re saying and talking about.”

Alicia Shepard, who was until recently the ombudsman for NPR, said most news coverage of Occupy “hasn’t been about the issues, it’s been about who’s up and who’s down,” likening it to the “horse race” style of coverage prevalent in political campaigns.

An analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that the movement occupied 10 percent of its sample of national news coverage in the week beginning Oct. 9, then steadily represented about 5 percent through early November.

Coverage dipped markedly, to just 1 percent of the national news hole, in the week beginning Nov. 6, supporting Ms. Shepard’s assertion that it had “died down” before the early morning eviction in New York last Tuesday. It has since rebounded strongly.

Throughout the protests, Occupy Wall Street has become something of an ideological litmus test, with accusations of media bias from the left and the right. Days after the protest began in New York, the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore appeared on MSNBC, asserting that the mass media had a tendency to play down left-wing protests.

Conversely, L. Brent Bozell III, the president of the conservative Media Research Center, appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox telling other media outlets to “put their pompoms down for a minute.”

Now, any time there are misstatements of fact — on Thursday the Fox News affiliate in New York falsely reported that protesters planned to “shut down” the subways, and “CBS Evening News” reported that hundreds had turned out for an afternoon rally when in fact many thousands had — questions about bias are raised.

Even as some protesters have complained about the media, others have courted coverage, and still others have taken matters into their own hands. For more than a month, Tim Pool, a 25-year-old from Illinois, has been attending Occupy Wall Street events in New York and live-streaming them to the Internet from his cellphone. “I just wanted to see an accurate portrayal of what was happening without internal or external bias,” he said.

Mr. Pool clearly sympathizes with the protesters but considers himself independent from the group. At the peak of the protests in New York on Thursday, 30,000 people were watching his shaky video feed at any given moment, according to his host site, Ustream. Mr. Pool said the police officers treated him like a protester, not a cameraman, raising questions about who qualifies as a reporter in the Internet age and what rights they should be afforded, if any.

The questions are relevant in part because 26 reporters and photographers have been arrested at protests linked to the movement, according to a count by Josh Stearns of the media advocacy group Free Press. A significant portion of those arrested were freelance workers, students and writers for alternative publications. “As journalism is changing,” Mr. Stearns said, “it’s going to create new friction and conflict over what we mean by the First Amendment.”

Many journalists were blocked from Zuccotti Park as the eviction took place on Tuesday morning, leading to accusations of police suppression of media coverage.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the restrictions were put in place “to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press.”

Journalism groups have filed complaints about the restrictions and arrests, resulting in renewed scrutiny of how the Police Department processes requests for press credentials. Of the 10 reporters arrested in New York on Tuesday, half had credentials. Discussing the arrests, Mr. Stearns said, “In the heat of the moment it may be very hard to tell who is and who isn’t a journalist,” though he said that was no excuse.

Some reporters have reported being threatened by protesters in the last two months, but for the most part the criticisms have been confined to signs and shouts, particularly when Fox News cameras are nearby.

Attesting to the opinionated tone of much television coverage, Fox hosts and guests have described the protesters as a “group of nuts and lunatics and fascists” (Karl Rove), “demonic loons” (Ann Coulter) and “a bunch of wusses” (Greg Gutfeld).

On MSNBC, meanwhile, optimism reigns in comments like “it is what working people are talking about” (Ed Schultz) and “it has the support of tens of millions of Americans” (Michael Moore).

A number of journalists have been pilloried for their perceived opinions, including the CNN host Erin Burnett, who mocked the New York occupation on her broadcast. Critics seized on the fact that she was engaged to a bank executive.

The public radio host Lisa Simeone was dismissed by one of her employers, Soundprint, after she was reported to be a leader of an Occupy camp in Washington, and a freelance journalist, Caitlin Curran, was fired by “The Takeaway” radio show after she was photographed holding her boyfriend’s sign at a protest. In an essay for Gawker, Ms. Curran wondered what ethics codes she had violated since she said Occupy Wall Street lacked a single “message and focus.”

The absence of broad media attention initially gave protesters a shared grievance. Since the Vietnam War, there have been many instances when protest movements have criticized the media over perceived slights, said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia who helped to organize the first national antiwar protests in the 1960s.

But there is less of an “obsession” about that these days, he said, “because they’re making their own media.”

There is The Occupied Wall Street Journal newspaper, for instance, and the “We Are the 99 Percent” group blog.

Priscilla Grim, who has helped produce both, said she was “hoping to see a real resurgence in independent media, to not just cover the issues of Occupy, but to cover the issues that all people are dealing with.”

Mr. Bruner, the Occupy Wall Street organizer, echoed that. Early on, he courted CNN, The New York Times and other news outlets by e-mailing reporters and editors with daily protest updates. But, he said, “we’re fighting a system, and this media is a part of the system.”

He added, ”And when this media doesn’t cover us in a fair light, the desire isn’t to shame them, it’s to create an alternative.”

    Protest Puts Coverage in Spotlight, NYT, 20.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/business/
    media/occupy-wall-street-puts-the-coverage-in-the-spotlight.html

An Uprising With Plenty of Potential

November 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES B. STEWART

In the wake of this week’s eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York and other urban campgrounds around the country, it’s tempting to dismiss the Occupy Wall Street movement as little more than a short-lived media phenomenon. The issues that spawned the movement — income inequality, money in politics and Wall Street’s influence — were being drowned out by debates over personal hygiene, noise and crime.

By Wednesday morning, when I dropped by the park, about 20 people, including some who looked disheveled and homeless, shared food and barely listened to a speaker with a graying ponytail who denounced New York as an “illegitimate police state.” Thursday’s “Day of Action” led to some more arrests, but it didn’t spawn the mass demonstrations some local politicians had predicted, let alone attract the throngs that the Tea Party mustered for a march on Washington in 2009.

But critics and supporters alike suggest that the influence of the movement could last decades, and that it might even evolve into a more potent force. “A lot of people brush off Occupy Wall Street as incoherent and inconsequential,” Michael Prell told me. “I disagree.”

Mr. Prell is a strategist for the Tea Party Patriots, a grass-roots organization that advocates Tea Party goals of fiscal responsibility, free markets and constitutionally limited government. He’s the author of “Underdogma,” a critique of left-wing anti-Americanism, which includes a chapter on the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s, which may be the closest historical parallel to the Occupy movement.

“They claim to stand up on behalf of the ‘little guy’ (the 99 percent), while raising a fist of protest against the big, rich, greedy and powerful 1 percent,” he said of the Occupy movement. “The parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement are too clear to ignore — right down to the babbling incoherence of the participants. The lesson from Berkeley in the 1960s and the protest movement they spawned is: it doesn’t matter that they don’t make sense. What matters is they are tapping into a gut-level instinct that is alive, or lying dormant, in almost every human being. And, when they unleash the power of standing up for the powerless against the powerful — David vs. Goliath — the repercussions can ripple throughout our society for decades.”

Mr. Prell hopes that doesn’t happen and is adamantly opposed to what he considers the movement’s big government agenda, but points out that “last generation’s protesters are today’s leaders.”

Sidney Tarrow, a visiting professor at the Cornell Law School, an expert in social movements and author of “Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,” agreed that the movement could emerge as a more potent national force once the encampments were no longer an issue. This week’s evictions “could be the foundation for a national social movement,” he said. The 1964 Sproul Hall sit-in at Berkeley “created a communal basis for a future social movement. They hadn’t met until they were carried out by police. That’s a powerful solidarity-creating experience. We may well see networks of activists growing up because of this. People in the same encampments, and people in different encampments, are now in constant contact and can share experiences. They’ll build a community. That’s why occupation of space is important.”

Mr. Tarrow said he was sympathetic to the goals of the movement, “and I’m especially pleased there’s someone outside the Democratic Party establishment who’s saying these things. Someone had to seriously open a debate about the yawning gap of inequality in this country.” He added: “My advice to them is, ‘Move on.’ The encampments were running out of steam. They’ve achieved the best they could hope to achieve, which is to draw the country’s attention to extraordinary inequality. In my view, they should pack up their tents and march on Washington.”

Jeff Goodwin, a professor of sociology at New York University, who has both studied and at times joined the protesters, said he felt Mayor Bloomberg did the protesters “a big favor. The attempt to disrupt or suppress the movement will backfire. People involved think this is just the beginning. People are having a conversation about what’s wrong with the country. The police are not going to dissuade them from protesting or remaining active. It’s just going to anger people and radicalize them, and maybe draw new people into the conversation.”

While Occupy Wall Street has caught the attention of the White House and shifted the national debate over the economy, much as the Tea Party movement did from a conservative and libertarian perspective, it hasn’t yet had anywhere near the Tea Party’s impact, and it hasn’t elected any political candidates or raised significant funds. But it may have less conventional goals.

Cornel West, a Princeton professor who has emerged as a prominent voice of the movement, called me from Seattle, where he’d just joined Occupy Seattle protesters at Seattle Central Community College, and was en route to Oakland to participate in more protests there. “We’ve got to regroup and bounce back,” he said of this week’s evictions. “There’s already been a victory. Everyone is talking about corporate greed and income inequality, and that wouldn’t have been imaginable even a year ago.” He added, “To think that New York City spent all of that taxpayer money on policing the protesters and arresting people, while right there on Wall Street are all these financial criminals and no one has been charged. The oligarchs get away with everything. The hypocrisy is just too much to take. The shift towards truth and justice is what the movement is all about.”

Mr. West said he didn’t know where the movement was headed, but “you can’t evict an idea whose time has come.”

    An Uprising With Plenty of Potential, NYT, 18.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/business/occupy-wall-street-has-plenty-of-potential.html

A Day of Protests

as Occupy Movement Marks Two-Month Milestone

November 17, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Protesters across the country demonstrated en masse Thursday, snarling rush-hour traffic in several major cities and taking aim at banks as part of a national “day of action” to mark the two-month milestone of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

While thousands of protesters clogged the streets in New York and more than 175 people were arrested in clashes with the police, demonstrators elsewhere in the country were largely peaceful, even as the crowds swelled during the evening commute.

Union workers, students, unemployed people and local residents joined the crowds in many cities, adding to a core of Occupy protesters. Among them were members of an umbrella group called the American Dream movement, which represents several unions and social justice groups, who staged protests on or near old, crumbling bridges.

Andy McDonald, a spokesman for the group, said the bridges were meant to highlight the economic emergencies facing many cities, which cannot afford to fix such important parts of their infrastructure. At various points during the day, bridges were blocked in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Houston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Hartford and Portland, Ore. The biggest event of the day culminated during the evening commute on the Brooklyn Bridge.

But the precise symbolism of bridges was often muddled, as activists also decried banking practices, called for more jobs and demanded a narrowing of the divide between the richest 1 percent of the population and the other 99 percent.

The protests came at a precarious time for the movement. Cities have been cracking down on the squatters in the Occupy movement, some of whom seem more preoccupied with the fact of their protests than with the future of any movement.

In Los Angeles, demonstrators blocked the Fourth Street bridge near the downtown financial district. More than 20 people were arrested after they ignored an order to vacate the streets. They marched from a Bank of America branch in the morning and set up tents in the middle of Figueroa Street. There were about 1,000 protesters on hand and about 100 police officers, making it perhaps the biggest march yet of Occupy Los Angeles. After the arrests, the crowd quickly dispersed. Lt. Andy Neiman of the Los Angeles police called the protesters “peaceful.”

In Chicago, where Occupy protesters were never allowed to set up camp in Grant Park, the movement’s presence has thinned dramatically since the temperature has dropped in recent weeks. On some nights, fewer than a half dozen protesters remain, pacing the sidewalk across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank downtown, where they have anchored their efforts for 56 days.

But on Thursday afternoon, despite the harsh winds and 30-degree chill, hundreds of protesters re-emerged for the largest showing in Chicago in weeks. Those in the crowd, including members of unions and other advocacy groups, chanted “Shut it down!” as they marched to the LaSalle Street Bridge, which spans the Chicago River just north of downtown. The police had already diverted traffic and emptied the bridge by the time the protesters arrived. Still, 46 protesters were arrested after they sat cross-legged in the middle of the bridge before the rest of the crowd continued their march through the city, flooding intersections and streets around the Federal Reserve Bank and the Chicago Board of Trade.

“Day to day we might be thinning because we have no encampment,” said Andy Manos, who helped organize the marches, adding that just because some protesters have gone indoors at night doesn’t mean they have gone away. “But this is a mobile occupation. This is a model that works for us.”

In Philadelphia, a few hundred people marched across the Market Street Bridge. A row of people, most of them unemployed, sat across the bridge linking arms and wearing signs that said “Willing to Work” around their necks. About two dozen people were arrested.

Earlier, about 75 members of Occupy Philly met in a Quaker meetinghouse to discuss how to respond if they were forced to leave their encampment in front of City Hall. The city had posted notices that the activists should leave because a planned construction project was “imminent.”

But the group did not make a decision about what to do, leading some to express frustration that the movement was becoming mired in logistics rather than expressing a coherent message.

“How do we make a point about why we’re here?” said Markus Schlotterbeck, 23. “We need to take the high road and make this about bigger issues.”

In Seattle, about 900 marchers shut down University Bridge, near the University of Washington, on Thursday evening. Earlier in the day, the Occupy Seattle encampment was quiet, save for the sounds of a three-person kitchen staff serving up dollops of instant oatmeal to the few who were awake.

Stephan Lee, 26, wearing a black pea coat and his hair in a ponytail, said that about 30 people had agreed to “stick it out, no matter what happens.” He said he had hitchhiked to Seattle from Great Falls, Mont., two months ago, and found that the movement in Seattle had become more organized since he arrived.

“People are getting a better bead on what’s going on and are learning to communicate better with each other,” he said. “We’re realizing that we have a common goal, even if we all have different messages.” That goal, he said, is to uphold American values.

Maria Guillen, 25, said the cold and rain had not hurt morale. “We are creating this movement little by little, as a people, as a collective,” she said. “We can’t say what will happen tomorrow.”

In California, protesters with Occupy Oakland, where the police have used tear gas to quell sharp confrontations, chose not to participate in Thursday’s call to action, shifting their next planned protest instead to Saturday in an effort to “continue this national momentum,” the group said on its Web site.

“Through a day of coordinated actions, we can demonstrate and build upon the potential that the Occupy movement holds in fighting the ruling authorities,” the group said.

In Dallas, there was no violence, but at least 17 people were arrested after police officers on horseback and in riot gear evicted Occupy protesters from a site near City Hall where they had been camping for the past six weeks.

In Portland, Ore., demonstrators gathered in the pouring rain on the east side of the Steel Bridge, the primary transit hub for the city. But their main focus was on the banks, including Bank of America and Chase. They held a sit-in at a Wells Fargo lobby. About 500 stood outside chanting: “We got sold out. Banks got bailed out.” Protesters lined the glass windows while police officers in riot gear stood inside in a row, shielding from view a small group of bank employees.

“You’re sexy, you’re cute. Take off your riot suit!” the crowd chanted. About 45 people were arrested.

The crowd included young and old, people from all stripes, and gained momentum and supporters as it marched. A 30-year-old woman who asked not to be identified said she was out for a run when the protesters passed by. She joined them in support, she said, “because we need a wake-up call.”

Emma Cornell, 57, a former prison educator now teaching courses online, said she drove to Portland from Lakeview, Ore., about five hours away. Until now, Ms. Cornell said, she had followed the movement on Twitter and through small demonstrations in her tiny community, where local Occupy supporters are searching for common ground with resident Tea Party activists. She said the groups differed over whether the solution to the country’s problems would involve more government regulation or less.

In Eugene, Ore., about 110 miles south, Occupy protests at banks drew about 200 to 300 people and the police arrested 17 demonstrators on charges of civil disobedience, according to KOIN 6, a CBS affiliate in Portland.

In Denver, about 100 protesters marched through the city, massing at various government buildings and snarling traffic at busy intersections. Flanked by mounted police officers, wide-eyed tourists and Broncos fans who had already gathered at downtown bars in advance of Thursday night’s game against the Jets, the protesters shouted, “This is what democracy looks like” as they marched.

Jack Kelsh, 47, a city bus driver who had come downtown to join the protesters, said: “I don’t think anything is going to stop this. The more resistance they get, the stronger they are going to get and the more rallies you are going to see.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Dan Frosch from Denver; Ian Lovett from Los Angeles; Isolde Raftery from Seattle; Lee van der Voo from Portland, Ore.; Sean Collins Walsh from Philadelphia; Malia Wollan from Berkeley, Calif.; and Steven Yaccino from Chicago.

    A Day of Protests as Occupy Movement Marks Two-Month Milestone, NYT, 17.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/us/occupy-protests-across-the-country.html

The Mayor Confronts the Protesters

November 15, 2011
The New York Times


The Occupy Wall Street protesters had achieved a great deal before they were rousted from Zuccotti Park by New York City police on Tuesday morning. This ragged group, living in tents and tarps for two months in the financial district in Lower Manhattan, helped focus everyone’s attention on the growing income inequality in this country. They made “99 percent” into popular language for the have-nots. They spawned protests against further enriching the already rich 1 percent, like those in Chicago, Boston, Oakland, Calif., New Haven, and even London.

For two months, a confrontation between the demonstrators and the City of New York has been steadily brewing. Mayor Michael Bloomberg restrained the police and resisted political pressure for weeks, but he had some legitimate worries about crowding, drug use, noise and unsanitary conditions. His decision to clear tents and sleeping bags out of Zuccotti Park, the focal point of the protests, and have the area cleaned, was justifiable legally.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that city governments may prohibit overnight camping in public spaces. A state judge followed that law in backing up Mr. Bloomberg on Tuesday.

But Mr. Bloomberg hasn’t done as good a job as he might have in managing the appearance of this last move, and we worry that his decision to clear the park of tents could end up quashing the entire protest.

We suspect there was a better, less-disruptive way to get demonstrators to deal with problems cited by the city and the park’s owner, Brookfield Office Properties. Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he had tried to meet with protesters and found that they “did not want to negotiate with the city.” That should not have been the end of it. Many of those protesters wanted to stay by obeying laws and respecting the community.

In that same interview, Mr. Bloomberg said that the park’s owner had asked the city to clear the area. He insisted that the surprise police action in the middle of the night was safer for everybody because fewer people were at the park. It is certainly true that the tumult showed much more restraint by both protesters and police than the rioting and use of tear gas in places like Oakland.

For the mayor, the test will now be how to make certain these important protests can go forward. He has said that the park should be open to everybody, not just the occupiers. Well, yes, but we doubt that that was the real motivation for clearing the park of tents. It sounded like a justification spun up by political advisers. In any case, protecting everybody’s right to be there should not be a pretext to keep out the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The mayor promised that the protesters would be allowed in the park 24 hours a day but not to sleep. They will almost certainly test those limits. Asked what happens when somebody lies down or goes to sleep on a bench in the park, the mayor said the protester would be asked to leave. If that does not work, the demonstrator would be carried out. Sounds like a recipe for conflict.

Now that Mayor Bloomberg has dismantled the anti-Wall Street group, he must keep his promise to support the protesters’ right to speak up about income inequality, especially in the city’s financial district.

    The Mayor Confronts the Protesters, NYT, 15.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opinion/mayor-bloomberg-confronts-occupy-wall-street.html

Beyond Seizing Parks, New Paths to Influence

November 15, 2011
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

The anti-Wall Street protests, which are being driven from their urban encampments across the nation, now face a pivotal challenge: With their outposts gone, will their movement wither?

In New York, where the police temporarily evicted Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park early Tuesday, and in other cities, dozens of organizers maintained that the movement had already reshaped the public debate. They said it no longer needed to rely solely on seizing parks, demonstrating in front of the homes of billionaires or performing other acts of street theater.

They said they were already trying to broaden their influence, for instance by deepening their involvement in community groups and spearheading more of what they described as direct actions, like withdrawing money from banks, and were considering supporting like-minded political candidates.

Still, some acknowledged that the crackdowns by the authorities in New York and other cities might ultimately benefit the movement, which may have become too fixated on retaining the territorial footholds, they said.

“We poured a tremendous amount of resources into defending a park that was nearly symbolic,” said Han Shan, an Occupy Wall Street activist in New York. “I think the movement has shown it transcends geography.”

Even before the police descended on Zuccotti Park overnight, some early proponents of Occupy Wall Street had begun suggesting that it was time to move on.

On Monday, Adbusters, the Canadian anti-corporate magazine that conceived of the movement, indicated that the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize.

Marina Sitrin, a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York who is involved in the movement, said its influence would continue to ripple out. People are already assembling to address local issues in Harlem and Brooklyn, she said. “There’s so much more than Zuccotti Park,” she said.

Indeed, with winter looming, it seemed possible that Occupy Wall Street’s encampment would end on its own as the cold drove people away.

Maurice Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., said New York City officials might have done Occupy Wall Street a favor “by providing a dramatic ending.”

In New York and around the country, the news media had begun highlighting less savory aspects of the occupations, including drug use, crime and influxes of homeless people who were not motivated by ideology, which could change the message from “we are the 99 percent” to “we are urban pathology,” Professor Isserman said.

“And suddenly, with a stroke, that’s no longer the problem or the issue,” he said, referring to the evictions.

Still, questions endure about whether, without Zuccotti Park, the movement might lose momentum or drift into irrelevancy.

Doug McAdam, a sociology professor at Stanford, predicted that the energy could quickly dissipate without the occupation. “The focal point will be lost,” he said.

The protesters did return to the park later Tuesday, with the city’s permission, but without the prohibited tents, tarps and sleeping bags that carried them through so many nights.

“Occupy Wall Street can only grow,” said Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for the group.

The organizers continue to claim public support. Donations topped half a million dollars weeks ago, and their storehouse, blocks away from the park in Lower Manhattan, is stuffed with nonperishables, blankets and other supplies sent from around the world.

One question is how protesters in other cities will react to the events in New York this week. Some experts wondered whether reduced visibility for Occupy Wall Street might hurt support for the cause elsewhere.

In interviews, protesters on Tuesday dismissed such speculation, saying that the clearing of Zuccotti Park would energize their commitment to seeking more regulation of the financial industry and reducing economic inequality.

“Whenever there is pushback, especially under cover of darkness, I think it will make us stronger,” said Dan Massoglia, a spokesman for Occupy Chicago.

In Oakland, Calif., Alexandra Hernandez, 22, said recent arrests of Occupy protesters across the country showed that it might be time for a shift in strategy. “I don’t know if the encampments will continue,” she said.

Officials will be watching closely. The authorities have now cracked down on camps in Denver, Oakland, Portland, Ore., and Salt Lake City.

Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, said the United States Conference of Mayors had organized two conference calls “to share information about the occupying encampments around the country.” He said participants on the calls were eager for advice on how cities were handling demonstrations.

William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, said Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots were grappling with what many new movements face. “What do you do for an encore when you’ve gotten people’s attention?” he said.

While grass-roots movements influenced many major social changes in the United States in the last century, Dr. Galston said that after they garnered attention, they invariably moved on to concrete demands, which the Occupy Wall Street effort has been criticized for lacking. The Tea Party, for example, has sought to repeal President Obama’s health care law.

It is apparent, though, that Occupy Wall Street’s impact is already being felt.

Union officials said the movement was a factor last week when Ohio residents voted overwhelmingly to repeal a state law limiting the collective bargaining rights of public workers.

“They helped define what it was that was going on, and gave people a sense that you can do something about it,” said Damon Silvers, the policy director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

Less certain is the movement’s impact on party politics. The protests took off just as Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats began trying to push Republicans to agree to a so-called millionaire’s tax. Some Democrats cautiously embraced the movement for raising the issue of income inequality, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started a petition drive that it called “100,000 Strong Standing With Occupy Wall Street.”

Last month, after the Congressional Budget Office reported that the top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, Mr. Obama used his weekly radio address to discuss the report and income inequality, saying that the middle class was under pressure.

Some Republicans, including presidential candidates, have sought to portray Occupy Wall Street protesters as a band of far-left rabble-rousers.

All of which indicates that the protesters’ message has trickled up, despite their tendency to reject the major political parties, analysts said.

Dr. Galston predicted that though protesters across the country were being pushed out of their encampments, their issues would endure.

“The underlying reality to which the movement has called attention is too big, too pervasive, too important to go away,” he said.

 

Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper from New York;

Dan Frosch from Denver; Malia Wollan from Berkeley, Calif.;

and Steven Yaccino from Chicago.

    Beyond Seizing Parks, New Paths to Influence, NYT, 15.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/
    occupy-wall-street-organizers-consider-value-of-camps.html

Protesters Vow to Retake Emptied Park

November 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Tuesday defended his decision to clear the park in Lower Manhattan that was the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement, saying “health and safety conditions became intolerable” in the park where the protesters had camped out for nearly two months.

Mr. Bloomberg said the city had planned to reopen the park on Tuesday morning after the protesters’ tents and tarps had been removed and the stone steps had been cleaned. He said the police had already let about 50 protesters back in when officials received word of a temporary restraining order sought by lawyers for the protesters. He said the police closed the park again until lawyers for the city could appear at a court hearing later in the morning.

“New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” the mayor said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

Later in the morning, the police cleared a lot at Canal Street, about a mile away, where some of the protesters had gone after the sweep at their encampment in Zuccotti Park. About two dozen people were arrested at the privately owned Canal Street lot, which the protesters had entered after snipping the chain-link fence with bolt cutters. At least four journalists were also led out in handcuffs, including a reporter and photographer for The Associated Press and a reporter from The Daily News.

The mayor’s comments at a City Hall news conference came about seven hours after hundreds of police officers moved in to clear the park, after warning that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” but that demonstrators who did not leave would face arrest. The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, initially resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!”

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that nearly 200 people had been arrested, 142 in the park and 50 to 60 in the streets nearby. Most were held on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, among them City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat who represents northern Manhattan. He was with a group near the intersection of Broadway and Vesey Street that was trying to link up with the protesters in the park. The group tried to push through a line of officers trying to prevent people from reaching the park.

The operation in and around the park struck a blow to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which saw the park as its spiritual heart. The sweep was intended to empty the birthplace of a protest movement that has inspired hundreds of tent cities from coast to coast. On Monday, hundreds of police officers raided the main encampment in Oakland, Calif., arresting 33 people. Protesters returned later in the day. But the Oakland police said no one would be allowed to sleep there anymore, and promised to clear a second camp nearby.

The police action was quickly challenged as lawyers for the protesters obtained a temporary restraining order barring the city and the park’s private landlord from evicting protesters or removing their belongings. It was not immediately clear how the city would respond. The judge, Lucy Billings of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, scheduled a hearing for Tuesday.

The mayor, at his news conference, read a statement he had issued around 6 a.m. explaining the reasoning behind the sweep. “The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day,” the mayor said in the statement. “Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with” because the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

“I have become increasingly concerned — as had the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties — that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community,” Mr. Bloomberg said. He added that on Monday, Brookfield asked the city to assist in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules.

“But make no mistake,” the mayor said, “the final decision to act was mine and mine alone.”

Some of the displaced protesters regrouped a few blocks away at Foley Square, with the row of courthouses on Centre Street as a backdrop, and swapped stories of their confrontations with the police as they talked about what to do next.

One protester, Nate Barchus, 23, said the eviction from Zuccotti Park was likely to galvanize supporters, particularly because a series of gatherings had already been planned for Thursday, the protest’s two-month anniversary.

“This,” he said, referring to the early morning sweep, “reminds everyone who was occupying exactly why they were occupying.”

The midday arrests at the Canal Street lot unfolded next to a triangular space known as Duarte Square, for the first president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Pablo Duarte. The city owns slightly less than half an acre of land there, on the eastern edge of the square. The western section is owned by Trinity Church, a major landowner downtown, and had been fenced off for the winter recently after an art installation was dismantled.

With dozens of police officers watching, protesters climbed to the top of the plywood fence and held a general-assembly-style discussion on whether to “liberate another piece of property,” and about an hour later — after some protesters said they had tried to obtain permission to enter the church’s lot — two protesters dressed in black appeared with bolt cutters. They quickly made an opening in the fence.

As the crowd poured in, police vans sped down Varick Street toward Zuccotti Park, where another group of several hundred protesters was trying to retake the space where they had camped out since mid-September. It was cleaner than it had been in some time: after the protesters were thrown out, workers using power washers blasted water over the stone that covers the ground.

The cleaned-up park caught the attention of passers-by who had become accustomed to seeing the protesters’ tents and tarps. One young father, pushing his toddler son in a stroller, gave police officers guarding Zuccotti Park a thumbs-up sign.

Another man, rushing by in a cream suit, flashed them a huge grin, and a blonde woman stopped in her tracks. “Ooh, good,” she said.

Marybeth Carragher, who lives in a building overlooking the park, said she and other residents were apprehensive about the city’s plan to let the protesters return, without their tents. “I think my neighbors and I are very thankful that the mayor acted,” she said, “but we remain completely outraged for having to endure this for nine weeks.”

The operation to clear the park had begun near the Brooklyn Bridge, where the police gathered before riding in vans to the block-square park. As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “This is our home” and “Barricade!”

The mayor’s office sent out a message on Twitter at 1:19 a.m. saying: “Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protesters can return after the park is cleared.” Fliers handed out by the police at the private park on behalf of the park’s owner and the city spelled out the same message.

The protesters rallied around an area known as the kitchen, near the middle of the park, and began putting up makeshift barricades with tables and pieces of scrap wood.

Over the next two hours, dozens of protesters left the park while a core group of about 100 dug in around the food area. Many locked arms and defied police orders to leave. Some sang “We Shall Overcome” and chanted at the officers to “disobey your orders.”

“If they come in, we’re not going anywhere,” said Chris Johnson, 32, who sat with other remaining protesters near the food area.

By 3 a.m., dozens of officers in helmets, watched over by Commissioner Kelly, closed in on those who remained. The police pulled them out one by one and handcuffed them. Most were led out without incident.

The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of encampment, which has prompted similar demonstrations across the country.

The move also came hours after a small demonstration at City Hall on Monday by opponents of the protest, including local residents and merchants, some of whom urged the mayor to clear out the park.

Before the police moved in, they set up a battery of klieg lights and aimed them into the park. A police captain, wearing a helmet, walked down Liberty Street and announced: “The city has determined that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard.”

The captain ordered the protesters to “to immediately remove all private property” and said that if they interfered with the police operation, they would be arrested. Property that was not removed would be taken to a sanitation garage, the police said.

About 200 supporters of the protesters arrived early Tuesday after hearing that the park was being cleared. They were prevented from getting within a block of the park by a police barricade. There were a number of arrests after some scuffles between the two sides, but no details were immediately available. After being forced up Broadway by the police, some of the supporters decided to march several blocks to Foley Square.

In the weeks since the protest began, Mr. Bloomberg had struggled with how to respond. He repeatedly made clear that he did not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics, but he has also defended their right to protest and in recent days and weeks has sounded increasingly exasperated, especially in the wake of growing complaints from neighbors about how the protest has disrupted the neighborhood and hurt local businesses.

 

Reporting was contributed by Cara Buckley, Joseph Goldstein, Matt Flegenheimer,

Rob Harris, Steve Kenny, Corey Kilgannon and Sarah Maslin Nir.

    Protesters Vow to Retake Emptied Park, NYT, 15.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html

Why Herman Cain Is Unfit to Lead

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By KIMBERLE WILLIAMS CRENSHAW and CATHARINE A. MacKINNON

HARD as it has been to watch, harder still to live through, the spectacle of Herman Cain’s dodging sexual harassment allegations is a real step up for the status of women. Their sexual treatment is now part of the open political process, rather than a smarmy rumor to be passed among cognoscenti in the dark.

The fact that what several women have said might register in a presidential campaign — as if women’s sexual mistreatment at work might really matter — could be a potential game changer, even though the prevailing dynamics of sex, race and power that made sexual harassment so difficult to denounce in the first place are amply on display.

The firestorm surrounding Clarence Thomas’s defense to Anita F. Hill’s allegations in his confirmation hearing for the United States Supreme Court 20 years ago not only falsely set up race and gender as mutually exclusive and opposing forces, but also framed subsequent defenses to sexual harassment charges by Bill Clinton and others as mere personal peccadillo or political fodder. Predictably, in this latest remix, political intrigue and racial grandstanding, combined with vicious attacks on the accusers, have obscured the principal inquiry: the leadership potential of a presidential candidate.

Sexual harassment is not a Democratic or Republican issue, a liberal or conservative issue, or a black or white one, although those politics can shape it. As a consequence, it does not present a test of group loyalty but a chance to evaluate the reported behavior of someone who seeks to govern.

Sexual harassment is no private problem, readily compartmentalized, or a merely symbolic disqualifier. The allegations of sexual harassment go to the core of Mr. Cain’s qualifications to lead. Even lacking certainty about facts, what emerges as the Cain story unfolds is a picture of a man with significant deficits in terms of temperament, judgment and, potentially, veracity.

The seeming lack of concern about behavior that cost his former employer money, the sense of entitlement and belief in personal impunity, and the supposed failures to remember are disturbing enough; the accusations about his behavior toward women, abuse of authority, and inability to follow the law should be presumptively disqualifying in a person who seeks to unite and lead.

Polls indicate that some may be swayed by Mr. Cain’s denials, suggesting that the disclosures are a smear campaign, implying that these women fabricated their claims to derail his nomination. How inconvenient that the two initial claims surfaced over a decade before there was any political campaign to derail, and that Mr. Cain’s own employer apparently concluded that prudence dictated their settlement. This decision does not reflect how easily employers can be cornered. Sexual harassment law sets the bar high, even for the kind of quid pro quo demands reported by Sharon Bialek, the first of Mr. Cain’s accusers to go public.

That the National Restaurant Association decided to resolve the prior claims with compensation provides some picture of their nature: they were most likely not a one-time event (unless extremely severe), they were most likely not made by someone whose credibility could be easily demolished, and they were most likely not behaviors that would offend only an overly sensitive woman (as Mr. Cain suggested when he said that he had merely compared the height of one of his accusers, Karen Kraushaar, to the height of his wife). The law requires a pervasive pattern of unwelcome behavior of a sexual nature or acts of real severity as viewed by a reasonable person that create a hostile working environment, or demands to exchange sexual compliance for workplace benefits. Anything less would have provided the company little incentive to settle.

Mr. Cain’s assertion that the public attention to these reports is “a high tech lynching” threatens to insulate his behavior from the deeper assessment it demands. Like Mr. Thomas, whose elevation to the Supreme Court was facilitated by this statement, Mr. Cain rides a wave of suspicion and empathy. It would be wrong to dismiss the appeal of his defense, given the common dimension of public sexual humiliation and how deeply “lynching” resonates as a metaphor for black men in the real context of the sexual politics of racial hierarchy.

But neither Mr. Cain nor Mr. Thomas stands in the shoes of those crucified for offenses against the powerful. No one was, or will be, killed and hung from a tree for defending the prerogatives of the top 1 percent. And it is germane that women of all races face a specific kind of public sexual humiliation for reporting their abuse at the hands of those with power over their employment. This is a major reason that so many, rather than speaking out, have opted for silence, and in overwhelming numbers still do. Simply put, women do not want to be pornography.

Remarkably but not atypically, Ms. Bialek’s Republicanism and her personal respect for Mr. Cain remain intact. Women who come out of the shadows, like Ms. Bialek and Ms. Hill before her, are not silenced as others can be, including by confidentiality agreements routinely forced on them by companies as the price of relief. These women want and expect the harasser to man up: acknowledge what he did, genuinely apologize, and change, meaning never do it again. And the failure of a candidate to do so should not be considered a winning political strategy but instead regarded as presumptive evidence of unfitness to lead. That would be a step toward real progress. Our leaders owe us nothing less.

 

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Catharine A. MacKinnon is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and a visiting professor of law at Harvard University.

    Why Herman Cain Is Unfit to Lead, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/why-herman-cain-is-unfit-to-lead.html

Police Begin Clearing Zuccotti Park of Protesters

November 15, 2011
The New York Times
By COLIN MOYNIHAN and COREY KILGANNON

The New York City police began clearing Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protesters about 1 a.m. Tuesday, telling the people there that the camp would be “cleared and restored” before the morning and that any demonstrator who did not leave would be arrested.

The protesters resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!” as the police began moving in and tearing down tents. The protesters rallied around an area known as “the kitchen” near the middle of the park and began building barricades with tables and pieces or scrap wood.

Dozens of officers moved into the one-square-block park from Broadway. As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “this is our home” and “barricade!” There were no immediate reports of arrests.

Before the police moved in, they set up a battery of klieg lights and aimed them into the park. A police captain wearing a visored helmet walked down Liberty Street with an announcement: “The city has determined that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard.” The protesters were ordered to “to immediately remove all private property” and that if they interfered with the police operation, they would be arrested. Property that was not removed, the police said, would be sent to the dump.

Some of the protesters grabbed their possessions. “They’re not getting our tents down,” one man shouted. People milled around, and some headed to the edges of the park.

The action comes as other cities’ police forces have begun evacuating similar protest camps, sometimes violently.

A handful of protesters first unrolled sleeping bags and blankets in Zuccotti Park on the night of Sept. 17, but in the weeks that followed, the park became densely packed with tents and small tarp villages that was shelter for the perhaps 200 protesters.

The protest inspired similar ones nationwide and attracted celebrities and well-known performers. It became a tourist attraction, inspired more than $500,000 in donations and gained the support of labor unions and elected officials while creating division within City Hall and the Police Department

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has struggled with how to respond. He repeatedly made clear that he does not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics, but he has also defended their right to protest and in recent days and weeks, has sounded increasingly exasperated, especially in the wake of growing complaints from neighbors about how the protest has disrupted the neighborhood and hurt local businesses.

The mayor met daily with several deputies and commissioners, as more business owners complaining and editorials lampooning him as gutless, the mayor’s patience wore thin.

    Police Begin Clearing Zuccotti Park of Protesters, NYT? 15.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html

Police Raid Occupy Oakland Camp

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MALIA WOLLAN

OAKLAND, Calif. — Hundreds of police officers in riot gear circled the Occupy Oakland encampment downtown on Monday morning, making arrests and flattening tents after city officials had issued several warnings for protesters to abandon the camp after the fatal shooting last week of a man who had been staying there.

There were far fewer demonstrators at the encampment than usual when the police arrived at Frank Ogawa Plaza on Monday at about 4 a.m., because many of them were marching in a nearby intersection and others had already left because of rumors of an impending police crackdown.

The police quickly set up barricades between the crowd and the camp and then moved into the plaza, arresting those who remained as police helicopters with spotlights circled overhead. The number of arrests was not immediately clear.

There has so far been no violence between protesters and officers, and by 7 :30 a.m. Monday, there were only about 50 protesters left at the plaza.

Some of the demonstrators shouted, “Shame, shame, shame,” and “We’ll be back.”

The plaza smelled strongly of vinegar, which protesters had poured onto bandanas worn over their eyes, noses and mouths to protect themselves against tear gas. Others carried a mixture that included milk of magnesia and could be used as an eye rinse.

“They’ve got us surrounded,” Jimi Devine, 25, said. “The banks obviously don’t want a bunch of riffraff living in the plaza.”

Richard Mead, president of a local chapter of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, who was at the plaza as an official observer with about 50 other union representatives, said he did not see any violence.

“I’m happy it’s going this way so far instead of tear gas, concussion grenades and people getting their heads beat in like last time,” Mr. Mead said.

Last month, the police rousted and then tear-gassed Occupy Oakland protesters, in the process critically injuring an Iraq War veteran who was struck in the head by a projectile thrown or shot by law enforcement officers combating protesters trying to re-enter the plaza. The police had cleared the plaza of an Occupy Oakland encampment earlier in the day.

The wounded veteran, Scott Olsen, 24, who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine, suffered a fractured skull. He was released from the hospital last week but continues to have difficulty speaking.

After that confrontation, Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland allowed protesters to remain at the plaza, which is adjacent to City Hall. The number of police officers patrolling the area was also scaled back.

The violence however, intensified the animosity between protesters and the police and led to a march that shut down the Port of Oakland for several hours, the nation’s fifth-busiest shipping port.

Thursday’ s fatal shooting occurred in the plaza, about 25 yards from Occupy Oakland’s tents.

On Friday night, the police released descriptions of two suspects, including one who witnesses told investigators “was a frequent resident at the Frank Ogawa Plaza for the past several days,” the authorities said. The victim also had been staying on-and-off at the camp, the police said.

City officials had issued at least three warnings to protesters since Thursday’s shooting, the most recent on Sunday.

 

Timothy Williams contributed reporting from New York.

    Police Raid Occupy Oakland Camp, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/us/police-raid-occupy-oakland-camp.html

The New Progressive Movement

November 12, 2011
The New York Times
By JEFFREY D. SACHS

OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

Washington still channels Reaganomics. The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.

Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression. Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose to restore democracy and shared prosperity.

The first age of inequality was the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era quite like today, when both political parties served the interests of the corporate robber barons. The progressive movement arose after the financial crisis of 1893. In the following decades Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson came to power, and the movement pushed through a remarkable era of reform: trust busting, federal income taxation, fair labor standards, the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage.

The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. The pro-business administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover once again opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess, this time culminating in the Great Depression. And once again the pendulum swung. F.D.R.’s New Deal marked the start of several decades of reduced income inequality, strong trade unions, steep top tax rates and strict financial regulation. After 1981, Reagan began to dismantle each of these core features of the New Deal.

Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.

None of this will be easy. Vested interests are deeply entrenched, even as Wall Street titans are jailed and their firms pay megafines for fraud. The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old.

The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.

The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.

Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.”

    The New Progressive Movement, NYT, 12.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-new-progressive-movement.html

Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging

November 12, 2011
The New York Times
By KEVIN ROOSE

ASTON, Pa.

NOT long ago, an unusual visitor arrived at the sleek headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan.

It wasn’t some C.E.O., or a pol from Athens or Washington, or even a sign-waving occupier from Zuccotti Park.

It was Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia. And the slight, soft-spoken nun had a few not-so-humble suggestions for the world’s most powerful investment bank.

Way up on the 41st floor, in a conference room overlooking the World Trade Center site, Sister Nora and her team from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility laid out their advice for three Goldman executives. The Wall Street bank, they said, should protect consumers, rein in executive pay, increase its transparency and remember the poor.

In short, Goldman should do God’s work— something that its chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, once remarked that he did. (The joke bombed.)

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.

”We want social returns, as well as financial ones,” Sister Nora said, strolling through the garden behind Our Lady of Angels, the convent here where she has worked for more than half a century. She paused in front of a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. “When you look at the major financial institutions, you have to realize there is greed involved.”

The Sisters of St. Francis are an unusual example of the shareholder activism that has ripped through corporate America since the 1980s. Public pension funds led the way, flexing their financial muscles on issues from investment returns to workplace violence. Then, mutual fund managers charged in, followed by rabble-rousing hedge fund managers who tried to shame companies into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shaking up their boards — anything to bolster the value of their investments.

The nuns have something else in mind: using the investments in their retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority.

A  PROFESSORIAL woman with a sculpted puff of gray hair, Sister Nora grew up in Limerick County, Ireland. She dreamed of becoming a missionary in Africa, but in 1959, she arrived in Pennsylvania to join the Sisters of St. Francis, an order founded in 1855 by Mother Francis Bachmann, a Bavarian immigrant with a passion for social justice. Sister Nora took her Franciscan vows of chastity, poverty and obedience two years later, in 1961, and has stayed put ever since.

In 1980, Sister Nora and her community formed a corporate responsibility committee to combat what they saw as troubling developments at the businesses in which they invested their retirement fund. A year later, in coordination with groups like the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investment, they mounted their offensive. They boycotted Big Oil, took aim at Nestlé over labor policies, and urged Big Tobacco to change its ways.

Eventually, they developed a strategy combining moral philosophy and public shaming. Once they took aim at a company, they bought the minimum number of shares that would allow them to submit resolutions at that company’s annual shareholder meeting. (Securities laws require shareholders to own at least $2,000 of stock before submitting resolutions.) That gave them a nuclear option, in the event the company’s executives refused to meet with them.

Unsurprisingly, most companies decided they would rather let the nuns in the door than confront religious dissenters in public.

“You’re not going to get any sympathy for cutting off a nun at your annual meeting,” says Robert McCormick, chief policy officer of Glass, Lewis & Company, a firm that specializes in shareholder proxy votes. With their moral authority, he said, the Sisters of St. Francis “can really bring attention to issues.”

Sister Nora and her cohort have gained access to some of the most illustrious boardrooms in America. Robert J. Stevens, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, has lent her an ear, as has Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, was so impressed by their campaign against G.E.’s involvement in nuclear weapons development that he took a helicopter to their convent to meet with the nuns. He landed the helicopter in a field across the street.

The Sisters of St. Francis are hardly the only religious voices challenging big business. They have teamed up on shareholder resolutions with other orders, including the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth and the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, both in New Jersey. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the umbrella group under which much of Sister Nora’s activism takes place, includes Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians and nearly 300 faith-based investing groups. The Vatican, too, has weighed in with a recent encyclical, condemning “the idolatry of the market” and calling for the establishment of a central authority that could stave off future financial crises.

“Companies have learned over time that the issues we’re bringing are not frivolous,” said the Rev. Seamus P. Finn, 61, a Washington-based priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and a board member of the Interfaith Center. “At the end of every transaction, there are people that are either positively or negatively impacted, and we try to explain that to them.”

On a recent Saturday morning, 12 members of the Sisters of St. Francis shareholder advocacy committee gathered in Our Lady of Angels, a cavernous, hushed building housing 80 nuns that if not for the eerie quiet would resemble an Ivy League dorm. As three nuns talked in the foyer, their tales of nieces and nephews echoing through the halls, the advocacy group, which includes several lay people, gathered in the Assisi Room for its quarterly meeting.

After a prayer, a group recitation from Psalm 68 (“The protector of orphans and the defender of widows is God in God’s holy dwelling”) and a round of applause for a nun celebrating her 50th anniversary, or golden jubilee, as a member of the order, they settled down to business.

Sister Nora, in a gray-checked jacket and a pink blouse overlaid with a necklace bearing the Franciscan cross known as a Tau, began by updating the group on its finances. In addition to its shareholder advocacy program, the committee has a social justice fund from which it allocates low-interest loans, in amounts up to $60,000, to organizations that fit with its mission. This quarter, it lent money to the Disability Opportunity Fund, a nonprofit that helps the disabled; and the Lakota Funds, a group trying to finance a credit union on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.

LATER, over lunch in the cafeteria downstairs, the Sisters of St. Francis discussed the delicate dance they face in their shareholder advocacy program — pushing corporations to change their actions, while not needling them so much on sensitive issues like executive pay that bigwigs like Mr. Blankfein, at Goldman Sachs, are not willing to meet with them.

“We’re not here to put corporations down,” Sister Nora said, between bites of broccoli salad. “We’re here to improve their sense of responsibility.”

“People who have done well have a right to their earnings,” added Sister Marijane Hresko, when the topic of executive compensation comes up. “What we’re talking about here is excess, and how much money is enough for any human being.”

Sister Nora nodded. “I can’t exclude people like Lloyd Blankfein from my prayers, because he’s just as much human as I am,” she said. “But we like to move them along the spectrum.”

Goldman tries to maintain a polite relationship. “We have found our conversations with Sister Nora Nash and other I.C.C.R. members to be very insightful and instructive,” a spokesman said.

But change has not been speedy. Despite some successes — such as a campaign directed at Wal-Mart that the nuns say led the company to stop selling adult video games — the insider-heavy nature of corporate share structures means that the Sisters of St. Francis rarely succeed in real-world terms, even when their ideas prove popular. Most of their submissions receive less than 20 percent of the shareholder vote, and many get stuck in single digits.

“I honestly don’t know if it’s been effective or not, but they do highlight issues other shareholders don’t,” Mr. McCormick of Glass, Lewis says.

Still, Sister Nora, who would give her age only as “late 60s,” said she would keep pushing companies to do the right thing. Lately, she has been particularly interested in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the natural gas collection technique that has been the subject of controversy over its environmental and chemical impact. She has been attending rallies for the antifracking cause, and has submitted resolutions to oil corporations including Chevron and Exxon, encouraging them to put firmer controls in place.

“My work will never be done,” she says. “God has his ways.”

Soon, Sister Nora will go on retreat, an annual Franciscan rite in which nuns retire to solitude for a week of contemplation and prayer. There, she will gather her strength, rebuild her fighting spirit and emerge ready for the next round of resolutions and closed-door meetings.

She has even identified her next target: Family Dollar, one of the many deep-discount chains that sell cheap imported goods to Americans who generally do not know, or necessarily care, where those products come from. Sister Nora wants to make sure Family Dollar’s suppliers have fair labor policies, and she is concerned about whether its products are free of toxins.

“They just got a new president,” Sister Nora says. “I have a letter ready to go Monday.”

    Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging, NYT, 12.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/business/sisters-of-st-francis-the-quiet-shareholder-activists.html

Back to Common Sense at the Polls

November 9, 2011
The New York Times

It might have been “too much too soon,” a chastened Gov. John Kasich of Ohio admitted on Tuesday night, after his state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected his attempt to break public employee unions. He certainly was right about “too much,” an analysis that also applies to other examples of Republican overreach around the country that were kicked into the gutter: an anti-abortion amendment in Mississippi, a voting restriction in Maine, the radical anti-immigrant agenda of a politician in Arizona.

These policies, and similar ones in other states, were passed in an arrogant frenzy by a Tea Party-tide of Republicans elected in 2010. Many of them decided that they had a mandate to dismantle some of the basic protections and restrictions of government. They went too far, and weary voters had to drag them back toward the center.

As a result, Tuesday brought an overdue return of common sense to government policy in many states. Many voters are tired of legislation driven more by ideology than practicality, of measures that impoverish the middle class or deprive people of basic rights in order to prove some discredited economic theory or cultural belief.

That was most evident in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly repealed a law pushed through last spring by Republicans to shred collective-bargaining rights for public employees. It prohibited bargaining on health benefits for state and local workers, including teachers, police officers and firefighters, and made it much harder to collect union dues or negotiate on staffing.

Many states are bleeding because of high salaries and lavish benefits, but, as New York and Connecticut have shown, it is possible to reduce them without breaking unions. The roughshod course chosen by Ohio, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana, made the real agenda all too clear: breaking the political power of public unions. Blue-collar voters in Ohio, many of whom got to the middle class through collective bargaining, understood the game.

Many of those same voters also supported a powerless amendment repudiating health care reform. With the matter up to the courts, there was little campaigning on the issue to explain its benefits to the uninsured.

In Arizona, voters recoiling from anti-immigrant stridency recalled the State Senate’s president, Russell Pearce, who was the main sponsor and public face of Arizona’s immigration law, which imposed sweeping police-state powers to harass and expel people without papers. The law, largely blocked in federal court, has done huge damage to the state’s economy and reputation, and voters in Mr. Pearce’s district clearly had had enough.

Maine voters saw right through the partisanship behind Republican attempts to eliminate same-day voter registration and reinstated it. In state after state, Republicans have tried to make it harder to vote, knowing that restrictions tend to hit lower-income and minority voters — traditional supporters of Democrats. Unfortunately, Mississippi voters were not as enlightened, approving a new requirement for identification cards at the polls.

But, even the voters in that state, one of the country’s most conservative, decisively rejected an amendment to ban abortion by declaring a fertilized egg as a person. The measure also would have effectively banned some forms of contraception and even in-vitro fertilization, and 58 percent of voters said that was going too far.

It is not clear that Tuesday’s votes add up to a national trend that will have an effect on 2012 or even the deadlock in Congress. But they do offer a ray of hope to any candidate who runs on pragmatic solutions, not magical realism, to create jobs and reduce the pressures of inequality on the middle class and the poor.

    Back to Common Sense at the Polls, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/opinion/back-to-common-sense-at-the-polls.html

Ohio Vote on Labor Is Parsed for Omens

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The landslide vote to repeal an Ohio law that limits collective bargaining has sounded a strong note of caution for Republican governors and lawmakers across the country, raising questions about some of their legislative efforts, especially those that would weaken labor unions. But the victory, while trumpeted by labor leaders, may not necessarily improve the prospects of unions or the Democrats, their traditional allies, in 2012, political analysts said.

As labor leaders took their victory lap Wednesday, Republicans and Democrats from Maine to Wisconsin were adding the Ohio results to their political calculus for next year’s presidential election. Would there be fallout in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker could face a recall vote next spring? What can Democrats do to try to keep the energy — and the issue — from fizzling?

Gov. John R. Kasich, who had pushed the law in Ohio, seemed chastened, acknowledging on Tuesday night that, for voters, the bill had been “too much too soon.” Even before the vote, his approval rating was just 36 percent, according to a Quinnipiac poll in October.

“The results here in Ohio are likely to give Republican governors and legislators incentives to be cautious,” said John C. Green, director of the Bliss Institute, a political research center at the University of Akron. “The popularity of the Republican position has fallen somewhat.”

But Tuesday’s result contained a twist: The same voters who overwhelmingly rejected the labor bill — by a margin of 61 to 39 percent — voted in even greater numbers in favor of a symbolic measure against President Obama’s health care law. Democrats dismissed it, but State Senator Bill Seitz, a Republican who opposed the repealed law, said it spoke to a deeper disgust among voters with the political class.

“The message is, a plague on both your houses,” Mr. Seitz said. “It was a nonideological expression of frustration by an overwhelming number of voters about the inability of their elected leaders to come up with a more consensus-based collaborative approach.”

Labor and Democratic politicians seized on the referendum as a warning to Republicans.

“Governors in other states ought to take heed of this,” said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “If not, they do so at their own peril, and they may face a backlash.”

Mr. Trumka was referring to Florida, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri and Tennessee, states where Republicans have sought to enact legislation to weaken labor unions.

Perhaps the biggest fallout of the Ohio vote will be in Wisconsin, where thousands of union volunteers have geared up to collect the 540,000 signatures needed to get Governor Walker’s recall on the ballot. Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while the states were distinct, the outcome in Ohio “should probably worry him a bit,” referring to Mr. Walker.

Stephan Thompson, executive director of the Republican Party in Wisconsin, said that comparing the situation in Ohio and Wisconsin was “ridiculous,” and that Democrats were “clearly desperate to manufacture momentum for their recall attempt.”

In Ohio on Wednesday, Democrats were ecstatic. They had dented, perhaps for the first time, the soaring Republican confidence that had enabled the party to enact ambitious legislative agendas in a number of states.

Still, Mr. Green cautioned against inferring too much from Tuesday’s victory, drawing the comparison with Republican euphoria after the 2010 midterms.

“They were very excited to win the election and then they found out that governing is very hard,” he said. “Unions and their allies have every right to be excited this morning, but what that means for the future is not entirely clear.”

Labor leaders said the Ohio results were an instruction manual for the Democrats, after months of being on the defensive.

“The election last night is the road map for the Democrats if they’re willing to use it,” said Michael Podhorzer, the A.F.L.-C.I.O’s political director. “The base isn’t permanently immobilized. It just needs to be mobilized by an issue they care about.”

Republican lawmakers said the electorate favored some of the law’s provisions — like performance-based compensation, and employees’ paying more toward health care and pension plans — and that while there was no immediate plan for new legislation, trimming labor costs was still pressing.

“SB5 went away last night but the problem didn’t,” said State Senator Keith Faber, a Republican.Other states watched warily, like Indiana, where a Republican-led legislative committee recently recommended adopting a right-to-work law, which would eliminate any requirement that workers in unionized workplaces pay union dues or fees.

Labor experts said events in Ohio were a cautionary tale against legislative overreach.

“This is a wake-up call to tone it down and take on more achievable goals,” said Samuel Estreicher, the director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University. “A movement towards reform is inevitable because the economics are calling for it.”

For public workers, it was, quite simply, a triumph.

“I did my work with a smile on my face and was very proud,” said Lee Eicher, a 57-year-old meat inspector. “We sent a message. We really sent a message.”

 

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Columbus, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

    Ohio Vote on Labor Is Parsed for Omens, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/us/politics/ohio-vote-on-collective-bargaining-is-parsed-for-2012-omens.html

Occupy Movement Inspires Unions

to Embrace Bold Tactics

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Organized labor’s early flirtation with Occupy Wall Street is starting to get serious.

Union leaders, who were initially cautious in embracing the Occupy movement, have in recent weeks showered the protesters with help — tents, air mattresses, propane heaters and tons of food. The protesters, for their part, have joined in union marches and picket lines across the nation. About 100 protesters from Occupy Wall Street are expected to join a Teamsters picket line at the Sotheby’s auction house in Manhattan on Wednesday night to back the union in a bitter contract fight.

Labor unions, marveling at how the protesters have fired up the public on traditional labor issues like income inequality, are also starting to embrace some of the bold tactics and social media skills of the Occupy movement.

Last Wednesday, a union transit worker and a retired Teamster were arrested for civil disobedience inside Sotheby’s after sneaking through the entrance to harangue those attending an auction — echoing the lunchtime ruckus that Occupy Wall Street protesters caused weeks earlier at two well-known Manhattan restaurants owned by Danny Meyer, a Sotheby’s board member.

Organized labor’s public relations staff is also using Twitter, Tumblr and other social media much more aggressively after seeing how the Occupy protesters have used those services to mobilize support by immediately transmitting photos and videos of marches, tear-gassing and arrests. The Teamsters, for example, have beefed up their daily blog and posted many more photos of their battles with BMW, US Foods and Sotheby’s on Facebook and Twitter.

“The Occupy movement has changed unions,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “You’re seeing a lot more unions wanting to be aggressive in their messaging and their activity. You’ll see more unions on the street, wanting to tap into the energy of Occupy Wall Street.”

Unions have long stuck to traditional tactics like picketing. But inspired by the Occupy protests, labor leaders are talking increasingly of mobilizing the rank and file and trying to flex their muscles through large, boisterous marches, including nationwide marches planned for Nov. 17.

Organized labor is also seizing on the simplicity of the Occupy movement’s message, which criticizes the great wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans compared with the economic struggles of much of the bottom 99 percent.

A memo that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sent out last week recommended that unions use the Occupy message about inequality and the 99 percent far more in their communications with members, employers and voters.

Indeed, as part of its contract battle with Verizon, the communications workers’ union has began asserting in its picket signs that Verizon and its highly paid chief executive are part of the 1 percent, while the Verizon workers who face demands for concessions are part of the 99 percent. A dozen Verizon workers plan to begin walking from Albany to Manhattan on Thursday in a “March for the 99 percent.”

“We think the Occupy movement has given voice to something very basic about what’s going on in our country right now,” said Damon Silvers, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s policy director. “The fact that they’ve figured out certain concepts and language for doing that, we think is really important and positive.”

Over the last month, unions have provided extensive support to Occupy protesters around the country, from rain ponchos to cash donations. National Nurses United is providing staff members for first-aid tables at many encampments, while the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s headquarters two blocks from the White House is providing shower facilities for the protesters occupying McPherson Square, 300 yards to the east.

Unions have also intervened with politicians on behalf of the protesters. In Los Angeles, labor leaders have repeatedly lobbied Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa not to evict the protesters. When New York City officials were threatening to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, hundreds of union members showed up before daybreak to discourage any eviction, and the city backed down.

Like any relationship, however, the one between the Occupy movement and labor is complicated.

Dozens of Occupy protesters have joined union members to picket the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles and Verizon offices in Washington, Buffalo and Boston. (A Verizon spokesman said the Occupy protesters “do not have the benefit of any information about the Verizon issues except what they’ve been told by the union, which is obviously one-sided and most likely inaccurate.”)

In New York, the Occupy protesters have joined the Teamsters in their attacks on Sotheby’s. The art auction house locked out 43 Teamster art handlers on July 29, after the union balked at its demands for sizable concessions.

In addition to the lunchtime protest at the Danny Meyer restaurants, Occupy protesters also joined recent picketing against Sotheby’s outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Diana Phillips, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman, said the company had offered a fair contract and “is unwilling to accept demands that virtually double the cost of their contract.”

Arthur Brown, a mental health worker who is one of the founders of Occupy Buffalo, where 50 people camp out each night, said the Occupy movement badly needed labor’s backing if it is to change the nation’s policies and politics.

“Young people started this movement, but they can’t finish it,” Mr. Brown said. “They don’t have the capacity or the experience to finish it. We really need the working class and union folks, the older folks, the activists from the ’60s. ’70s and ’80s, to help make this a full-fledged movement that will change the political landscape of America.”

But some Occupy protesters worry that organized labor might seek to co-opt them.

Jake Lowry, a 21-year-old college student and an Occupy participant, said: “We’re glad to have unions endorse us, but we can’t formally endorse them. We’re an autonomous group and it’s important to keep our autonomy.”

George Gresham, president of 1199 S.E.I.U., a union that represents more than 300,000 health care workers in the Northeast, said his union wanted to help the Occupy movement amplify its voice.

“This is a dream come true for us to have these young people speaking out about what’s been happening to working people,” Mr. Gresham said. His union has offered to provide 500 flu shots and a week’s worth of meals for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

María Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said it remained to be seen whether the unions and the protesters could, by working together, achieve concrete change.

“Workers are with the Occupy movement on the broader issues; they’re with them on the issue of inequality,” she said. “The question is, can the labor movement or the Occupy movement move that message down to the workplace, where workers confront low wages, low benefits and little power? Can we use it to organize workers where it really matters, in the workplace, to help their everyday life?”

    Occupy Movement Inspires Unions to Embrace Bold Tactics, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/business/occupy-movement-inspires-unions-to-embrace-bold-tactics.html

Trouble Beside the Bay

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By ISHMAEL REED

Oakland, Calif.

JEAN QUAN may be the first in many categories — the first Asian-American and first woman to be mayor of Oakland — but she is far from the city’s first chief executive to face off with its police force. While dozens of mayors around the country have had to deal with Occupy movements, only Ms. Quan has seen the initially peaceful protests turn into street violence and even a general strike — a turn almost wholly attributable to the brutality of the city police.

In their zeal to fight back, however, the protesters, many of them white out-of-towners, have left locals unsure of who really has their best interests at heart.

On Oct. 25 the world saw an Oakland police force that blacks have had to deal with for decades — even before the Black Panthers organized to protest the shooting of a black youth in the 1960s, a time when the police were said to be recruited from the South because they knew how to handle African-Americans. In a video watched worldwide, an officer in riot gear fired a tear gas canister at a protester; the victim, an Iraq War veteran, later underwent surgery for his wounds. When some occupiers went to help him, another canister was lobbed at them.

That same night officers allegedly used rubber bullets during an assault on campers in Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. If so, that would violate the department’s rules of engagement. Those rules were adopted in 2003, after the police assaulted antiwar protesters at the Port of Oakland, even injuring some longshoremen who happened to be passing by.

The force’s viciousness, particularly against blacks and Latinos, is legendary. In one recent case, a group of officers known as the Riders, who racked up an impressive list of drug takedowns, were accused of brutality, kidnapping and planting evidence on their road to arrests. Another officer, nicknamed “Audie Murphy,” after the sharpshooting war hero and film star, shot four suspects and killed three. So little has been done to reform the force that a federal judge has threatened to take the entire department into receivership.

Many of Oakland’s officers don’t even live in the city, but rather its suburbs, a fact that helps maintain a strong “us versus them” worldview. (At a recent community meeting I proposed that the city study a plan, developed by Detroit, that rents foreclosed homes to police officers for as little as $1,000, to keep them in the city.)

The police still have influence in City Hall, though: their union repeatedly and vocally criticizes elected officials, including the mayor. For years it opposed making officers pay toward their pensions like other city workers. (The union agreed to start contributing in July.)

Mayor Quan initially supported the police after the Oct. 25 clashes. Keith Olbermann called for her resignation; so did Michael Moore, who made a nuisance of himself by barging into Oakland Highland General Hospital, demanding to see the injured veteran (who had already been transferred to another hospital). Support for the protests grew, with statements of sympathy coming in from Cairo and Düsseldorf, Germany.

Such pressure may explain why Ms. Quan later apologized for the use of excessive force by the police, and is now trying to take a hands-off approach to the matter. Needless to say, the police department has been critical, saying it was “confused” by her latest moves.

All of this has left Oakland’s blacks and Latinos in a difficult position. They rightly criticize the police, but they also criticize the other invading army, the whites from other cities, and even other states, whom they blame for the vandalism that tends to break out whenever there is a heated protest in town: from the riots after the murder of Oscar Grant by a transit police officer in 2009, to the violence of the last two weeks downtown and, most recently, near the port.

Someday we may discern the deeper historical meaning of these latest events. For now, what’s striking are the racial optics. How did Asian-Americans respond to the sight of a diminutive Asian-American mayor being hooted off the stage by a largely white crowd at an Oct. 27 rally? And where was the sympathy when, in years past, unarmed blacks and Hispanics were beaten or killed? Why did it take the injury of a white protester to attract attention?

Meanwhile, those hurt most by the protests are local business owners and workers, many of them minorities. Jose Dueñas, the chief executive of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Alameda County, blamed the Occupy movement for stalled economic activity. “We’ve got no events planned, people are pulling back,” he told a local newspaper. “We don’t blame them.” The cash-strapped city has spent over $1 million so far in occupation-related costs.

Local activism has been pushed aside as well. Even as Occupy Oakland has occupied the Bay Area headlines, hundreds of black, white and Latino parents met to oppose plans to close five schools in black neighborhoods. The following day there was hardly a single line of newsprint about the meeting.

The Occupy movement has important things to say. But in its hurry to speak, it risks shutting out those who have been waiting their turn for a long time.

 

Ishmael Reed is the author of “Blues City: A Walk in Oakland.”

    Trouble Beside the Bay, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/opinion/trouble-beside-the-bay.html

Demonstrators Test Mayor,

a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By KATE TAYLOR

Shortly before noon on Wednesday, the barricades that impeded foot traffic along Wall Street for weeks came down. Elected officials praised the mayor. Shopkeepers breathed sighs of relief.

But just seven hours later, the barricades went back up. Occupy Wall Street protesters were on the move, and the police were worried they would flood the street.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who over the last seven weeks has struggled publicly with how to manage New York City’s response to the demonstration Occupy Wall Street, on Thursday offered a staccato analysis of his administration’s latest effort at finding a way forward:

“Taken down. People marched in the streets. Put up. We’ll try again.”

The decision to remove the barricades, followed by the quick reversal, was emblematic of the quandary that has vexed Mr. Bloomberg and his administration since a few hundred people critical of the nation’s economic inequities first bedded down in Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17.

Mr. Bloomberg’s evolving response to the protest has come to embody a central tension in his third term, between his celebration of free, and at times cacophonous, speech as a hallmark of New York, and his emphasis on bolstering the city’s economy by improving its appeal to residents, employers and tourists. Mr. Bloomberg, who is generally known for his decisiveness, at first emphasized his disagreements with the protesters, then began describing them as peaceful dissenters exercising a fundamental liberty. In the last several days, he has sounded increasingly exasperated, a reflection of complaints from neighbors and accusations of criminal activity in Zuccotti Park.

“There is no easy answer,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters on Thursday morning. “But there is a right answer, and the right answer is allow people to protest, but at the same time enforce public safety, provide public safety and quality-of-life issues, and we will continue to do that.”

Since Sept. 15, when a reporter asked him about the planned protest — “First I heard about it,” he responded — Occupy Wall Street has come to dominate Mr. Bloomberg’s public time. He was asked about the movement while marching in a Columbus Day parade, painting the finish line for the New York City Marathon and visiting Jerusalem. His attitude toward the protesters has been parodied on “Saturday Night Live.” At one point, he felt compelled to disclose that he did not talk about Zuccotti Park while in bed with his girlfriend.

The mayor is in an awkward position — while the protesters proclaim themselves “the 99 percent,” Mr. Bloomberg, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $19.5 billion, is an elite member of the top 1 percent, the 12th richest person in a nation of 312 million. His wealth derives from Wall Street, the target of the protesters’ ire, and he has repeatedly made clear that he does not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics.

“My personal view is, why don’t you get out there and try to do something about the things that you don’t like, create the jobs that we are lacking, rather than just yell and scream,” Mr. Bloomberg said Thursday. “But if you want to yell and scream, we’ll make sure you can do it.”

Mr. Bloomberg has managed simultaneously to be less sympathetic to the protesters’ point of view, and more sympathetic to their right to protest, than some other elected officials around the nation. “There’s nobody that’s more of a defender of the First Amendment than I am,” he has often said.

In Oakland, Calif., protesters have been furious with the mayor, Jean Quan, since the police used tear gas at a demonstration; this week, a march there attracted thousands and forced the port to close. In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa had been accommodating, giving the protesters ponchos during a rainstorm, but has more recently said that their encampment “cannot continue indefinitely.”

In New York, the protests have altered life at City Hall. Mr. Bloomberg meets daily with an unofficial protest task force, made up of the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; the fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano; two deputy mayors, Howard Wolfson and Caswell F. Holloway; and the head of the city’s Law Department, Michael Cardozo. Many evenings, he calls Mr. Wolfson or Mr. Holloway for an update before he goes to sleep.

For Mr. Wolfson, protest response has become virtually a full-time job. He talks regularly with key players, including John E. Zuccotti, the co-chairman of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns the park; members of the local community board; and elected officials and labor leaders. He monitors social media and occasionally responds to critics.

Mr. Wolfson and Mr. Holloway visit the park; Mr. Wolfson rides by on his bike on weekends. Mr. Wolfson photographed a warning sign near flammable materials at the encampment, which he then posted on the Internet as evidence after fire officials confiscated generators and cans of gasoline.

Mr. Bloomberg has interacted with the protesters directly only once, on the evening of Oct. 12, when he briefly walked through the park. He was both cheered and heckled as “Billionaire Bloomberg.”

“Clearly he’s not personally or ideologically committed” to the protesters’ agenda, said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College, “and he has spoken publicly and sometimes in a tone-deaf way about what their agenda might be and what it all means.” At the same time, Professor Muzzio said, he “doesn’t want to be known as the anti-free-speech mayor” or “the hammer of the 1 percent.”

In the early weeks, the New York police came down hard on the protesters, arresting hundreds during a march across the Brooklyn Bridge, and pepper-spraying several during a rally. But an effort to clear out Zuccotti Park temporarily for cleaning was abandoned when hundreds of supporters gathered to protect the encampment. There continue to be regular arrests — on Thursday, over a dozen demonstrators were detained after marching to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs — but the city has generally tried to avoid confrontation.

“As inconvenient as this is, the image that New York City is peaceful and tolerant in the long run is better for business than the image that the city is turbulent and ugly, and I think the mayor and the people who surround him understand that,” said Kenneth Sherrill, a professor of political science at Hunter College.

Some of the protesters said they sensed that Mr. Bloomberg was in a difficult position.

“I don’t think it’s prudent for him to make a decision on what’s going on here right now, for a lot of different reasons,” Jason Harris, 40, said. “The general feel that I get when I’m down here is I sense a limbo in the political system and our leadership in exactly how to handle this.”

Mr. Bloomberg and his aides seem uncertain when, or how, the protest will end, although they have suggested that winter could thin the protesters’ ranks, and have pledged to take whatever actions they deem appropriate for public safety.

“At the moment, it will continue,” Mr. Bloomberg said of the protest last week. “What will happen down the road... ,” he said, trailing off. “We watch it very carefully.”

    Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/nyregion/for-bloomberg-wall-street-protest-poses-a-challenge.html

A Parade of Protesters, in a Court Just for Them

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

Inside a blandly lighted courtroom, a lawyer stood before packed rows of protesters who had been arrested in September, laying out their options: They could take the prosecution’s offer to have their cases dismissed after six months, or ask for a trial.

The third option was to plead guilty.

“I don’t recommend that as a solution,” the lawyer, Martin R. Stolar, said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

The Occupy Wall Street movement reached a new phase on Thursday, as the first of hundreds of protesters arrested in Manhattan made their initial court appearances — even as over a dozen more were arrested outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan after they ignored the police’s order to leave.

While the movement has been seen as fluid and spontaneous, what happened in Manhattan Criminal Court was anything but that. The protesters were brought to a specially designated court, and all the more than 60 arraignments were over in about two hours.

About 85 percent of the protesters who appeared before Judge Neil Ross said they wanted to take their cases to trial; only 9 of the 65 defendants accepted the prosecution’s offer to dismiss their charges after six months if they did not get rearrested.

Two protesters had misdemeanor charges. The rest had been charged with disorderly conduct, a violation that is not a crime. One protester was not offered the deal; another, John Farley, who writes for WNET, had his case dismissed.

“Yeah, awesome,” one of the protesters in the courtroom whispered. Applause quickly followed, to which a court officer quickly responded: “That will not be tolerated. Express yourselves outside.”

Fourteen of the protesters did not show up and must appear on the next court date, Jan. 9, before warrants for their arrest go into effect.

Thursday’s court date was for the protesters arrested during a march near Union Square on Sept. 24. Those arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1 will have to show up in court later this month.

“The Manhattan district attorney’s office fully supports the tradition of civil disobedience and that all individuals have the right to protest, if they do so in a law-abiding way,” Michele Bayer, an assistant district attorney, said in court.

But the defendants in this case “took to the streets in the area of Union Square, disrupting traffic and preventing cars and other vehicles from being able to get by,” Ms. Bayer added.

One after the other, defendants had their lawyers tell Judge Ross whether they would go to trial. Mr. Stolar, a lawyer for the protesters, said that in the case of Christopher Soucy, he believed the complaint to be technically deficient.

“It said that he blocked vehicular traffic by standing on the sidewalk,” Mr. Stolar said, drawing chuckles from supporters.

Judge Ross told Mr. Stolar that he would have to put in a written motion to dismiss, and the case was scheduled for Jan. 9, the same date scheduled for all of the other defendants who chose to go to trial.

Elizabeth Mahony, an 18-year-old freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, was one of the nine protesters who accepted the prosecution’s offer, known as an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal. She explained that she wanted “to focus on school.”

Ms. Mahony’s parents, who live in Boston and were in court with her, said that when other people hear of their daughter’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street, they say, “Oh, you must be so proud.”

John Mahony, her father, said, “We haven’t seen this kind of activity since the ’60s.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg encouraged protesters to report crimes taking place at their encampment in Zuccotti Park, saying on Thursday that he was concerned by reports that the protesters were trying to police themselves, rather than informing law enforcement officials. Such behavior, he said, “allows the criminal to strike again, making all of us less safe.”

 

Al Baker and Kate Taylor contributed reporting.

    A Parade of Protesters, in a Court Just for Them, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/nyregion/first-set-of-arrested-occupy-wall-street-protesters-arrive-to-court.html

Oakland Police Clash With Fringe Protesters

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By MALIA WOLLAN

OAKLAND, Calif. — Protesters and city officials here took a deep breath and tried to calm the waters Thursday after a night of vandalism and tear gas disrupted an orderly day of anti-Wall Street marches. But tensions remained high, both between demonstrators and the police and between Occupy Oakland protesters and a belligerent fringe group that seemed intent on clashing with law enforcement and destroying property.

More than 100 people were arrested in the melee, and the injured included both protesters and police officers.

After an afternoon of picketing banks, a crowd that city officials estimated as at least 7,000 strong descended on the city’s waterfront Wednesday evening, temporarily closing one of the busiest ports in the country. Port officials reported no injuries or property damage, and the port was reopened Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, several hundred protesters regrouped near the Occupy Oakland encampment downtown. Shortly before midnight, some of them entered a nearby abandoned building. Objects were hurled at police officers, who then declared the crowd an unlawful assembly and began firing tear gas and beanbag projectiles.

The police eventually arrested dozens of the protesters, who were part of an Occupy Oakland subgroup that the city’s interim police chief, Howard A. Jordan, described as “generally anarchists and provocateurs.”

Conflicts within the protest movement were evident throughout the night as people on the street argued and screamed at one another, encounters that on several occasions nearly came to blows. Some members of the group that had closed the port reprimanded those who smashed windows, threw rocks, ignited a 15-foot-high bonfire of garbage and covered downtown storefronts with graffiti.

When a man wearing a bandana broke a window with an empty beer bottle, another protester yelled, “Who are you? That isn’t what this is about!” Another man screamed, “The police are not your enemy!” at young people wearing gas masks and the Guy Fawkes guise that has come to represent anarchists and the hackers group Anonymous.

“There are large disagreements inside the movement, but that’s actually what pushes us forward,” said Boots Riley, 40, a member of the rap group the Coup, who was on the bullhorn at the front of the marchers for much of Wednesday. “What we did during the day was much bigger, much more disruptive, than what the people breaking windows did last night,” he said.

Dozens of the protesters pitched in Thursday to help clean up some of the damage from the previous night’s events.

In the past, the city has seen similar clashes between the police and violent splinter groups. The most recent such flare-ups occurred after Oscar Grant III, a young, unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a transit officer in 2009.

Protesters here have renamed Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, the site of their encampment, Oscar Grant Plaza.

Mayor Jean Quan applauded the protesters and the police for the largely peaceful march. As for the evening of confusion and violence, “a very small group of people can create chaos,” she said.

 

J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.

    Oakland Police Clash With Fringe Protesters, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/us/protest-in-oakland-turns-violent.html

Oakland’s Port Shuts Down

as Protesters March on Waterfront

November 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MALIA WOLLAN

OAKLAND, Calif. — Thousands of Occupy Oakland protesters expanded their anti-Wall Street demonstrations on Wednesday, marching through downtown, picketing banks and swarming the port. By early evening, port authorities said maritime operations there were effectively shut down.

“Maritime area operations will resume when it is safe and secure to do so,” port officials said in a statement, asking marchers to “allow your fellow 99% to get home safe to their families.”

Despite the disruption of work, the crowd at the port was peaceful.

Protesters had called for a citywide general strike on Wednesday, and asked other demonstrators in cities across the country to do the same, after violent clashes with the police here last week that included tear gas barrages and injuries involving both police officers and protesters.

While the city was not shut down by the protest, many businesses chose to remain closed Wednesday. Some that stayed open posted signs declaring their support for the marchers.

Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, a supporter of the movement who had nevertheless come under fire from the protesters after last week’s confrontations, had called for a minimal police presence on Wednesday. The police did keep a very low profile throughout the afternoon as the crowd grew and as splinter groups of hundreds of protesters broke off from the main body and pushed into surrounding streets.

“We support many of the demands, particularly the focus on foreclosures, fair lending practices and making capital available to low-income communities,” Ms. Quan said at a news conference.

Police officers needed to be on hand, she said, to protect everyone’s free-speech rights in balance with legitimate public safety concerns.

Some of the protesters blocked entrances to branches of Chase and Wells Fargo banks shouting: “Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.”

For more than a week, protesters had circulated strike posters and leaflets throughout the city reading “No Work. No school. Occupy Everywhere” and “Liberate Oakland and shut down the 1 Percent.”

Protesters in New York, Boston and Philadelphia also marched on Wednesday, some expressing solidarity with Oakland’s event.

The protesters here marched late Wednesday afternoon to Oakland’s waterfront, home to the fifth-busiest shipping port in the country, to try to shut it down. Rumors circulated through the crowd earlier in the day that port workers had failed to show up for their morning shifts, but port officials said that was not the case and that all seven maritime terminals were operating during the day.

About 40 port workers out of 325 did not report for work on Wednesday, said Craig Merrilees, a spokesman for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which did not authorize a strike.

But by early evening, Mr. Merrilees said, the port was shut down.

“Nothing is coming in or out of here right now" he said.

He said workers were en route for the 7 p.m. shift, but he “highly doubts” they would be able to get through protesters.

The port has been closed for several hours in the past during similar mass protests, he said.

City offices remained open on Wednesday, though city officials reported that 5 percent of workers were absent and believed to be participating in the strike. About 300 of the Oakland Unified School District’s 2,000 teachers also took the day off and schools reported small increases in student absences, according to district officials.

The marquee of the Grand Lake theater replaced movie titles with a statement reading: “We proudly support the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Closed Wed. to support the strike.”

Ms. Quan, meanwhile, urged protesters to patronize and not penalize the downtown businesses that remained open. The mood at the protest remained jovial throughout the day as ice cream vendors, pushing their carts, joined the marchers, though some graffiti appeared on the walls of banks and there were reports of several broken windows at banks and other businesses.

Police officials said no arrests had been made as of Wednesday afternoon.

In addition to the city residents who took part in the protest, people drove in from across the state to participate.

Lenore McAllister, 30, arrived from Danville, about 22 miles east, with her three children, ages 4, 3 and 1. Her 4-year-old daughter held a sign that read, “Toddlers are the 99 percent and even we share.”

Her children thought they were at a parade, Ms. McAllister said. “I support the Occupy Oakland movement,” she added. “I’m here to teach my children to share by teaching the banks to share.”

    Oakland’s Port Shuts Down as Protesters March on Waterfront, NYT, 2.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/us/occupy-oakland-protesters-set-sights-on-closing-port.html