#OccupyWallStreet Comes to Brooklyn Heights [Video]

#occupy a shower.

@bleh — I was at Cadmen and under the bridge as the OWS participants came down the stairs.

Whatever your opinion, it is important to stick to the facts. They are not dirty filthy people in need of a shower. They looked 100% American and were 100% peaceful.

But the most interesting fact is that all the restaurants and bars on Henry Street were occupied, packed, making $, and this was only at 8:15 pm when only a fraction of the marchers had spilled out into Brooklyn. Occupiers were turning away from shops because they were already too crowded and started trickling down Montague.

@Bloomberg — Why don’t you embrace the movement and encourage all those displeased with the status quo to come to New York City to engage in dialogue and patron a few local businesses. Create forums and fill spaces or auditoriums where you personally interact with your voters and OWS-ers in finding solutions. And listen.

Tell the world, NYC is open for business and democracy!

Here’s one for you. Hold an occupy healthcare forum since it’s in the NYC charter and you already run the HHC with 11 hospitals and a $6.7 billion budget. Why not explore “Medicare for All/Single Payer” with the 99% and an open mind in how beneficial it would be for NYC and the nation in creating jobs in health care delivery as opposed to health insurance administration. It would make “Made in U.S” industry more competitive internationally since all other industrialized competitors have national healthcare. More importantly, more industries would be able to afford to return to NYC and create jobs here and now (or not leave in the first place). Mayor Bloomberg you can lead the national dialogue as the civic leader of the largest city.

Aside from the Connecticut’s Health Insurance giants complaining, why wouldn’t Wall Street want to take the burden of health insurance off the balance sheet of every other business? Then think of the savings to NYC and NYS in their public employee retirement obligations, tens of billions of dollars?

Don’t crack skulls, engage Mayor Bloomberg. Create a true legacy in your 3rd term.

Brilliant song at the end, Karl!

At first glance, I thought the Fund CUNY sign said Fund CUN*. I was thinking that’s a strange sign.

“Counting the cars on the NJ turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America”, one of my all time favorite song lines ever (yay Simon & Garfunkel).

Saw a picture of 2 suits, one was holding a sign that said “Get a Job”, the other was holding a sign that said “Occupy a Desk”. :-)

Karl captured the mood and Biviano’s ideas are right on target. These are not people shouting down public forums, packing guns to public gatherings, spouting hate lines like “kill the bill”. They are young American citizens speaking out in the best way open to them against the MONEY IS POWER crowd.
Their hypocritical enemies from Rush Limbaugh down are either knaves or fools. How else to explain those who really seem to believe that big corporate power with no accountability except to the buck is morally, ethically and legally preferable to democratically elected government.

Earlier there was a subway action city wide.

#OCCUPY the BOROUGH HALL SUBWAY STATION
Part of an international day of protest!
November 17, 2011 3 PM
• The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans
• The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90%
• In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent
• Of the 100 highest paid chief executives in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income tax

Nicholas D. Kristof “America’s Primal Scream”. New York Times Sunday October 16, 2011 p.11

• “Between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent….meanwhile, during the same period the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million”
• The Social Contract
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 22, 2011 NYT Op Ed Page
We treasure our political democracy in America. But it is ineffective because there is no social and economic democracy. Corporate lobbyist Abramoff boasted last week that he had controlled at least 100 congressional offices by promising jobs to the chiefs of staff. Oligarchy and plutocracy is un-American,and immoral. Our social contract must apply to all! The chief demand of Occupy Wall Street is to create and expand social and economic democracy, to strengthen political democracy and a moral and ethical basis for society. We will end Occupy Wall Street when Wall Street stops occupying our Congress and ripping off the poor, working, and middle classes. Please join the worldwide movement for freedom and an end to despotism and injustice.

Guys, the 1% aren’t going to be found in the subway stations. Jeez!

Sorry, I was at the Borough Hall station yesterday at 4:30 pm. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING noticeably out of the ordinary was happening there.

@Occupy Borough Hall: Just more delusional OWS drivel. BTW, if you don’t like the economics here, feel free to move to somewhere more appealing. No one is being held hostage.

@Topham, do you not remember 2 or 3 years ago when swastikas were found spray painted all over the synagogues on Remsen Street? That’s a hate crime.

@Topham

In Sept 2007 Swastikas were painted all over Remsen St, including both synagogues:

http://brooklyneagle.com/archive/category.php?category_id=27&id=15654

In response, as a pro-active way forward of civic engagement and outreach, I submitted to both Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in Oct. 2007 the following proposals:

http://bivforbrooklyn.com/news/79-peacenyc

No one in NYC political leadership has ever commented on the submittal despite offering up all the bloated rhetoric in the world when a hate crime emerges, except for Iranian Community Affairs Commissioner Nazli Parvizi who passed claiming redundancy within city agencies. I say Iranian because of her heritage, professionalism and beauty vis-a-vis the hateful drumbeat for war with Iran at the time in 2007 and the renewed and escalated clamor for war with Iran today in 2011.

Nonetheless, the proposal is a blueprint for powerful politicians like Bloomberg to engage with the citizenry whether over violence or the aspirations of OWS.

@Boba Fett

I use Iranian in this instance not as incendiary to put a face and a name on a people. In this case a very beautiful, professional, intelligent, capable and familiar face in the highest levels of NYC government.

When you have the majority of the Republican presidential candidates and every right wing talk show host champing at the bit to bomb Iran (aka the Iranian people), we must do everything we can to put a face on the people we are bombing, what it means to them and their children, and to us as a nation. This was the original thrust of the PeaceNYC proposals at a time when the rhetoric was heightening to attack them then (i.e. John McCain’s “Bomb bomb bomb Iran”) and again today.

I sincerely apologize if you find my intent distasteful, but I find war and the current war rhetoric beyond incendiary and at the root of so many of our domestic woes, so I try to make familiar connections to humanize the process.

In essence, when someone talks about bombing Iran, please think of Commissioner Parvizi, her extended family, and tell the person espousing war about our commissioner. We are all connected in this world much more than we care to admit.

@Topham

How do you feel about the “Kill the Jews” phrases that were spray painted? Is that novel in your view?

http://brooklyneagle.com/archive/category.php?category_id=27&id=15654

Turns out the man who sprayed the phrases and swastikas was armed to the teeth with guns and pipe bombs:

http://www.brooklyndaily.com/stories/2010/7/courier-yn_brooklyn_front_page-bhbombbust.html

GHB,

You have a helluva nerve addressing yourself to other commenters with personal opinions masquerading as immutable fact. Did you oppose the Supreme Court’s decision in the Skokie case? Was the ACLU which supported the Nazis’ right to march an anti-Semitic organization for doing so?

Doug,

I oppose hate crimes legislation which is almost always used to curtail civil rights, thereby giving government more power. In this legalistic and punitive country of ours – we have more of our fellow citizens in prison than any other country – there are more than enough laws to deal with any crime you’d care to name. Hate crime legislation criminalizes thought which is none of the government’s business. If a man menaces a Jew, he ought to be punished for the menacing, not for his private opinions of Jews. The law should treat of deeds only.

@Topham

I don’t disagree with your point about our government curtailing our civil rights to gain more power and how punitive it is.

It is certainly ironic that a government so brutal in how it incarcerates its own citizens, mostly its poor ones, and bombs other nations like Iraq based on ideology not fact has the chutzpah to make hate crime law.

In my estimation, it is our government’s way of band-aiding the hate it creates in whipping its people up to a froth in making war. Make no mistake, the swastikas happened at a time of heightened rhetoric for war with Iran in 2007, as we are now witnessing more anti-Semitic crimes 5 days ago as political “leaders” (I use that term loosely) whip us up for war with Iran yet again.

The purpose of the PeaceNYC proposal is to counter all this hatred and violence through free speech and dialogue by leverage public institutions and spaces and civic engagement. Would be curious of your thoughts on the proposal.

Btw, you did not answer whether or not you thought the sprayed threats were novel? You answer questions like a politician…

thousands of Columbia U. faculty signed a statement supporting OWS. I stood with two 80 y.o. Brooklyn Heights ladies at the Borough Hall event, two Columbia journalism students, an MFA from CUNY, a retired college professor,a bunch of union members, students from NY Tech on Jay St. , none were “unwashed”. TV somehow always shows the minority “crazies”. Some of the younger college students are somewhat fashionably scruffy, but they are intelligent and ambitious, not “unwashed” or recreations of ’60s hippies.