The City of New York has finally agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street for the property destroyed in the Zuccotti Park police raid on Nov. 15, 2011.
OWS initiated a suit on May 24, 2012, seeking compensation for the destruction of their People’s Library—a collection of over 5,000 donated books. About 3,600 of these were Read More
Walking east along Church Avenue from Nostrand last Thursday afternoon, The Observer counted two police officers on every corner. At New York Avenue, there were five cops and two squad cars. From a row house just past East 35th Street, three men in bulletproof vests and black topcoats emerged. And once we reached Albany Avenue Read More
School is back in session, and so are those pesky professors fighting NYU’s plans to expand in Greenwich Village. In the spirit of the season, NYU Faculty has teamed up with The Illuminator, Occupy Wall Street’s Great Bright Hope. Famous for projecting a 99 Percent sign on the side of the city’s ugliest building, the van is back, this time trolling the streets of Greenwich Village rather than the Brooklyn Bridge.
After getting to know a few NYU faculty members, the Illuminator team was asked to partner with them and spread the message on campus. Last night, they hit the street, projecting soothingly clever graphics onto the side of three different structures around campus. Read More
An activist group founded by the notorious Koch brothers is holding a demonstration in Midtown tomorrow to voice its opposition to President Barack Obama’s economic policies and to stand up to the “Occupy Wall Street mob,” according to a press release.
Activists from Americans for Prosperity plan to protest tomorrow morning outside the Time-Life building as part of group’s Failing Agenda Bus Tour, which is devoted to urging President Barack Obama to shun policies that increase the nation’s debt. Despite the group’s billionaire backers, the AFP describes itself as a grass roots organization. It has more than 2 million supporters nationwide.
In addition to the bus tour, the Americans for Prosperity is launching a $25 million ad campaign in support of Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy next week, according to the Huffington Post. The group has already spent $15 million on ads attacking President Obama.
A spokesman for the group’s New Jersey chapter said the demonstration would serve as an opportunity to disavow Occupy Wall Street, the movement that professes to advocate for the 99 percent.
“The Occupy Wall Street crowd is nothing but a fringe element of malcontents bent on mayhem and destruction,”said Steve Lonegan, director of Americans for Prosperity’s New Jersey branch. “These are people who despise free enterprise. They are not attacking Wall Street. They are attacking the very freedoms that everyday Americans cherish to pursue their own dreams and succeed.” Read More
Occupy Wall Street commemorated the first anniversary of its birth in the manner one would expect: There were a couple of pointless rallies, the usual slurs directed at anybody with more than a few dollars in his or her wallet, and in the end, about 150 demonstrators achieved the dream of every comfortable radical—they were carted off by police.
Another victory for people! Take that, Wall Street!
If only the Occupiers could tell us what, precisely, they wish to change (other than their clothes).
There’s no question that some of the young people milling around Wall Street have legitimate grievances. Job creation remains stagnant; lots of bright young people—and no small number of middle-aged workers—are out of work or underemployed. The national unemployment rate seems stuck at just over 8 percent. That’s bad enough, but things actually are worse here in New York, where the rate is 10 percent.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some people are taking their anger to the streets. The problem is that the Occupy movement is steered by folks who are using legitimate grievances as an excuse to demonize the successful, provoke the police and otherwise display their contempt for free enterprise and American capitalism.
That much is obvious in the rhetoric of the Occupy leaders. Read More
Protestors will attempt to surround the New York Stock Exchange on the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, according to Reuters. Looking to meet up with some like-minded people? Want to know which intersections to avoid? Go here, for the tactical map.
The Winklevoss twins are disrupting the sell side, or Read More
It was bound to happen: Jay-Z’s comments about Occupy Wall Street in the recent T Magazine profile of the rapper/entrepreneur (written by novelist Zadie Smith), found their way to the Occupy movement itself. And as they were no doubt going to do, they’ve stirred up a bit of a media tempest. Read More
Brookfield Asset Management C.E.O. and president J. Bruce Flatt has sold his two-bedroom co-op at 165 Duane Street. We totally understand. Whatever charms Lower Manhattan held for the financial guru were almost certainly diminished by the whole Occupy Wall Street debacle. After all, it was his (well, Brookfield’s) own Zucotti Park that they were occupying. Read More
Dimitry Sheinman is an author, painter, self-proclaimed clairvoyant and, most importantly, a suspect in the brutal 2004 killing of Juilliard student Sarah Fox.
In June, after several years in Africa, Mr. Sheinman returned to New York to deliver police information that he claimed he obtained through psychic visions—and to shop around a book about his experience with this still-unsolved Read More
On Sunday, with temperatures hovering around 85 degrees, the Occupy Wall Street movement headed Out East to protest Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s $50,000 a plate dinner at the Southampton home of billionaire David Koch— one of three local fundraisers expected to raise a cumulative $3 million over the weekend.
Shouting “Election for sale” and “For $50,000, you could be a Koch whore too,” the crowd of approximately 150 people assembled with signs and music behind a banner reading “Mitt Romney Has a Koch Problem,” the event’s unofficial slogan. A similar banner was flown above the nearby beach, towed behind a MoveOn-commissioned plane. That organization also brought its Romney Mobile, complete with fake dog strapped to the roof and company logos such as UBS and Bain Capital Ventures on the side.
More than an anti-Romney protest, the focus was on Koch and the influence of wealth on the electoral system. Signs read “Romney is All Koched Up” and “End Corporate Personhood” while a balloon was scrawled with “Romney = Koch Sucker” (the protestors apparently wanting it both ways, pun-wise, when it came to Mr. Koch’s surname). Read More
