The Unions Weigh in for Occupy

If you want to understand why the November 17 "Out of the Park and Into the Streets" demonstration called by Occupy Wall Street and major unions is going to be big--really big--start with the small table in the thicket of tents that crowd Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. Read more »

From the IndyBlog

National

• How Liberty Park’s Ragged Utopia Is Changing the World
  By Nicholas Powers, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  "Who is ready to defend our park?” the speaker shouted. It was 6 a.m. and thousands of us filled the Occupy Wall Street camp under a pre-dawn sky. (5 comments)
• Demands, Who Needs ‘Em?
  By By Costas Panayotakis, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  One of the most common criticisms of the movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street is that it lacks clear demands. (2 comments)
• Policing the 99 Percent
  By Elizabeth Henderson and Manny Jalonschi, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  As The Indypendent goes to press, there are more than 400 occupations across the United States — from big urban centers to smaller cities and towns. Below is a sampling of police responses to these encampments. (1 comment)
• A Left-Wing Tea Party?
  By Arun Gupta, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  One month into the Occupy Wall Street protest, many are asking if this new movement is just a “left-wing Tea Party.” (1 comment)
• Wall Street’s Web of Deceit
  By Nicholas Powers, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  Occupy Wall Street protesters insist that the financial industry’s power over our lives must end. Here are a few reasons why. (1 comment)
• All Occupations Are Local
  By Arun Gupta, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  The sure-fire method to find occupations in small cities is to head for the center of town. (1 comment)
• Charting Occupations: Private to Public, Economic to Political
  By Arun Gupta, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  The first recorded political occupation, a sit-down strike, occurred nearly 3,200 years ago in Ancient Egypt during the rule of Ramses III when tomb workers occupied six temples protesting the lack of food and supplies. (0 comments)
• People’s Media: OWS
  By Manny Jalonschi, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  With mainstream media being generally dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street protests, independent media outlets have filled the void with everything from breaking news and information on how to get involved to thoughtful analysis. (0 comments)
• To Repress or Co-opt? OWS Media Coverage Mirrors Splits Within the 1 Percent
  By Kevin Young, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  Gandhi is often credited with saying, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” (0 comments)

Local

• We Contain Multitudes
  By Indy Staff, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. (0 comments)
• Labor Finds a Young Soulmate
  By Ari Paul, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  In unions all across the United States — with a few exceptions — radical members and staffers have been waiting for Godot, dreaming of a moment when their leadership takes the membership away from the next contract or organizing battle and to a broader agenda of economic justice. (3 comments)
• Warming Up For Winter
  By Manny Jalonschi, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  As the Occupy Wall Street live-in protest enters November, temperatures are dipping closer to the freezing point — presenting a more immediate threat than co-optation or mass arrest. (0 comments)
• OWS and the Outer Boroughs
  By Zachary Smith, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  Occupy the Bronx kicked off Oct. 15 at Fordham Plaza and included more than a hundred people, most of them people of color. (0 comments)
• November Community Calendar
  By Indy Staff, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  (0 comments)
• October Community Calendar
  By Indy Staff, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  Check out our calendar of great events in October. (0 comments)
• RIP-OFF! New Report Details Rampant Rent Fraud Across the City
  By Steven Wishnia, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  Almost half the rent-stabilized apartments in New York City may have illegally high rents, according to a study released in August by the housing activist group Make the Road New York. (0 comments)
• Thirty-Four Post Offices to Close in New York City
  By Indy Staff, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  The Postal Service is considering closing more than 3,700 post offices across the country, including 34 in New York City, under rules that require individual postal stations to meet annual revenue quotas or face being shut down. The impact would be felt most heavily in low-income urban and rural communities. (1 comment)
• Public Sector Attacks Undermine Racial Progress
  By Yvonne Yen Liu, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  In March 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tenn. to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers who toiled for poverty wages in horrendous working conditions. Following King’s assassination there on April 4, the workers won legal recognition for their union. (1 comment)

International

• Change the World, Occupy that Square
  By Costas Panayotakis, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  The triggers for and demands of the protests reflect the specific conditions within each country, but the movements also exhibit a growing realization that the neoliberal socio-economic model is bankrupt even as it continues to subordinate national politics to the dictates of capital. (0 comments)
• Inside Mexico’s Peace Movement
  By By Kristin Bricker, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  In recent years, Acapulco has endured a plague of violence — beheadings, massacres of tourists, kidnapping of schoolchildren and demands from criminal gangs that teachers pay 50 percent of their salaries as protection money. In the vast majority of the cases, no one has been charged with these crimes. (1 comment)
• Policing, Indigenous Style
  By Kristin Bricker, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  While the Mexican state of Guerrero is plagued by both drug war violence and police corruption, it is also home to one of the most innovative criminal justice projects in the country: the community police. (0 comments)
• Student Movement Stirs Up Chile
  By Shalini Adnani, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  Chile is widely touted as a Latin American economic miracle of with an annual growth rate of 5 percent, stable finances and an average per capita income of more than $15,000. Yet, its prosperity is belied by some of the highest income inequality in the region and a lack of social mobility. (0 comments)
• Palestinian Statehood: A Desparate Strategy
  By Ali Abunimah, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  What do you do if your decades-long campaign to bring about an independent Palestinian state on those fractions of historic Palestine known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip has resulted in total failure? (0 comments)
• Egyptian Workers Labor on an Unfinished Revolution
  By Ari Paul, in the Aug 1, 2011 issue
  For 26 years, Mohammed Gharib Abdullah has been proud to be a mechanic at the Timsah Shipbuilding Company on the Suez Canal, a symbol of Egyptian economic and engineering might. He works in Ismailia, a desert city of 750,000 inhabitants near the midpoint of the 101-mile-long-canal that links the Mediterranean and Gulf of Suez. (0 comments)
• U.S. Money Spurs Spread of HIV Criminalization Laws
  By Julie Turkewitz, in the Aug 1, 2011 issue
  A collection of new laws in African countries has opened the door to imprisoning people with HIV who practice safe sex, mothers who transmit the virus to their children and even those who have HIV but are undiagnosed. (1 comment)
• The Andean Connection: Tracking the Drug War’s Coca Leaves and Failed Policies
  By Benjamin Dangl, in the Aug 1, 2011 issue
  Cocaine, the drug fueling the trade that’s left thousands dead in Mexico and Central America since 2007 and which 1.4 million Americans are addicted to, originates with two species of the coca plant grown in the South American Andes. (2 comments)
• Hondurans Pay the Price for Failed War
  By Ryan Devereaux, in the Aug 1, 2011 issue
  By the squeezing the illicit drug trade from below in Colombia and above in Mexico, U.S. policy has caused violence to balloon throughout Central America, destabilizing a region that has long been subject to American meddling. (0 comments)

Culture

• Chronicling NYC’s Open Public Spaces
  By Rahul Chadha, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  The legal reasoning that allows members of the Occupy Wall Street movement to lay claim to Liberty Park (or Liberty Plaza Park, as I would prefer to call it) is confusing enough to leave all but the most studied lawyers scratching their heads. (1 comment)
• Keep it in the Park: Art Exhibit Strains to Make a Point
  By Mike Newton, in the Nov 2, 2011 issue
  Red and black. And gray. That’s what I think of when I recall “No Comment,” a hastily-assembled exhibit in the echo-y lobby of the historic JP Morgan building, just a few blocks from Liberty Park — the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (0 comments)
• Red Scares Then and Now
  By Mike Newton, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  “Once-Proud Campus a Breeding Ground for Idiots”— this was the headline of a 2001 editorial published in the New York Post reporting on a post-9/11 teach-in at the City College of New York (CCNY). Though the teach-in focused on fostering a progressive and pragmatic discussion among professors and students about the 9/11 attacks, the mainstream media saw this gathering as a radical attack against America itself (0 comments)
• Waiting for Reform
  By Rahul Chadha, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  It seems that filmmaker Vanessa Roth and producers Dave Eggers and Ninive Calegari had a very specific audience in mind for their documentary American Teacher: those “rational” people who actually think that teachers are overpaid. (0 comments)
• Breaking the Girl
  By Irina Ivanova, in the Oct 5, 2011 issue
  How does a nice girl end up in an abusive relationship? This is the question Deborah Kay Davies explores in her riveting novel True Things About Me, an account of the unraveling of one such nameless “nice girl” from the girl’s own perspective. (0 comments)
• Attica!
  By Kenneth Crab, in the Sep 6, 2011 issue
  While the upcoming tenth anniversary of the September 11 tragedy is bound to generate a massive public display of remembrance, the same attention will not befall this country’s bloodiest suppression of a prison inmate uprising, forty years ago on Sept. 13. (0 comments)
• Planet of the Apes
  By Kenneth Crab, in the Sep 6, 2011 issue
  Jane’s Journey is a predictably, yet no less disappointingly, streamlined celebrity profile of living legend Dr. Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist whose trailblazing observations of wild chimpanzees made her a household name over half a century ago. (0 comments)
• Taking Stock of Modern Times
  By Scott Borchert, in the Sep 6, 2011 issue
  Best of Times, Worst of Times grapples with the political, economic and social forces that shape our lives in the waning era of U.S. empire. The stories vary widely in narrative form and perspective, but together they evoke a sense of what living through the last few decades in the United States was like for many. (0 comments)
• The End of the Line
  By Bennett Baumer, in the Sep 6, 2011 issue
  Paul Clemens’ Punching Out is a dreary but enjoyable read about the closing of a Detroit factory. The book starts with the last auto part leaving the Budd Detroit Automotive Plant, Stamping and Framing Division. Punching Out’s strength is in Clemens’ knack for sizing up the remaining workers, who are tasked with taking apart the massive assembly-line presses that stamped out auto parts. (0 comments)