It was not so much the rain as the wind that wreaked havoc upon the blue and green vinyl tents that had recently sprung up in startling numbers inside of Zuccotti Square, one Wednesday afternoon in mid-October. Rather than retreat indoors, perhaps to the dry Starbucks around the corner, protesters weathered the storm in what could only be interpreted as a mark of smoldering defiance. They remained outside in the rain, sheltered inside of thin plastic ponchos and clustered underneath tarps.
Local news stations would later report that only half the usual number of visitors showed up that day to protest due to heavy rains. But in spite of a diminished crowd and uninviting weather, there was an unusual energy throughout the square. The handsome young star of a popular television show could be seen loitering contemplatively between aisles of tarp; towards the center of the square fights could be overheard breaking out between several restive protestors; at the park’s edges a few inveterate protestors remained stationed to their posts.
The rainy day marked just over a month since occupiers had first set up camp in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to protest Wall Street’s role in the escalating economic crisis, spawning the controversial Occupy Wall Street movement and capturing the attention of the worldwide media.
The protest, which officially began in New York City on September 17th before rapidly spreading to cities around the globe, was ignited by a radical proposal published in the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters over the summer. The proposal called for 20,000 protesters to assemble, “and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” in what the writers hoped would become a continuation of the protests that began during the Arab Spring earlier this year, and played a pivotal role in the Egyptian Revolution.
The provocative blog post stated, “The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”
The movement, which as of yet has not elected a leader or released a formal list of demands and has been praised and criticized in equal measure for its “headlessness” and lack of cohesion, is unified primarily by a shared sense of moral indignation both at the increasing economic class disparity throughout the United States, and at banking institutions who have been indemnified by the government for their role in the current economic collapse.
Kat Adams, a 27 year old street medic stationed near the Southwestern corner of the park, compared the struggles of the burgeoning protest to those of the Civil Rights Movement. “Civil rights, off the bat, was blocked at every corner,” said Adams. “Because they weren’t far enough into the mainstream.”
Adams said that the present goal for Occupy Wall Street right now is to get its message out.“Have you seen the movie Network?” he asked. When I replied that I hadn’t, he described a famous scene in the film where the frustrated protagonist, a news anchor, shouts on live television that he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. “We’re saying, ‘We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!’”
The very nature of the economic practices that led to our present crisis were, by necessity, over the heads of most people. According to Gregg Rule, Senior Vice President of the Portfolio Group and a Financial Advisor for MorganStanley and Smith Barney, it was precisely a lack of public knowledge about the economy and banking system that facilitated the financial crisis.
“Few people in this culture have even a rudimentary understanding of [economic] topics,” wrote Rule, in an e-mail. “The bankers want to keep it that way.”
It was perhaps this perpetuated ignorance regarding the economy that explained in part why media outlets were initially so uncertain about how to cover Occupy Wall Street. In the first few weeks of the movement many journalists were quick to declare that the protests seemed to come out of nowhere.
In hindsight, many financial experts have blamed collusion between the government and the financial industry to deregulate the economy for subsequent practices like increased speculation and reliance on derivatives such as CDOs that led to the subprime mortgage crisis and, inevitably, to the bailouts of major banking corporations.
"The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war,” wrote Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve — and the man who was labeled by many as responsible for risky lending practices that led to the housing crisis — in an editorial published in the Financial Times in March of 2008.
Later that year, in a congressional hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan added, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
To add further salt to the wound, a report released by Bloomberg News in November after the Federal Reserve unsuccessfully tried to prevent its publication, found that the bailouts were even larger than the public had previously been told. “Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system,” read the report compiled by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz. “—More than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”
On October 7th an article on Mashable reported that Occupy Wall Street had spread to 928 towns and cities around the world: from San Francisco, Des Moines, and Denver to global epicenters like London, Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
The extraordinary proliferation of OWS has benefited enormously from social media and its ability to rally people together in service of political causes, a phenomenon Eric Augenbraun of the Guardian disparagingly referred to as “hashtag activism”.
Occupy Together, a website that describes itself as a “hub for all of the events springing up across the world in solidarity with the Occupy Wall St. movement,” and has been linked by Adbusters, occupywallst.org (and even received a Twitter mention from notorious documentarian Michael Moore) is one such example of how activists are using social media to coordinate protests efforts and streamline information. The website recently teamed up with Meetup.org to find, list, and update protest events.
“The GREAT thing about all of this, is that it’s completely in line with the whole idea of this decentralized movement,” read an announcement on Occupy Together. “Any single person can start an action in their area, and where one stands up there will likely be another to join you!”
But while social media may have alleviated the technical burdens of getting people together to protest, other complications are less easily remedied, such as the threat of group arrests and violent clashes with the police, which have occurred in many OWS offshoot sites.
The earliest and perhaps largest incident to receive national media attention was the mass arrest of 700 protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1st, most of which were for disorderly conduct. The NYPD claimed that they only arrested protestors who had wandered into the street and were obstructing traffic. However, many protestors, some of whom are now in pursuing a class-action suit against the city, claimed that they were herded onto the bridge by police officers where they were then effectively trapped—a common police tactic known as kettling.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, has been active in banning kettling in Washington, D.C., a practice she referred to as a case of trapping and detaining.
“You cannot arrest people without causing a crime; it is a complete violation of fourth amendment rights,” said Verheyden-Hilliard. “We’re trying to stop the NYPD from using the trap and detain tactic. We believe that people should have the right to demonstrate without the threat of false arrest.”
Jill Nelson, a journalist and activist who authored “Police Brutality” in 2001, described the kind of violent tactics used by the police against protestors as essentially par for the course, saying it did not surprise her. But Nelson asserted that such displays of police aggression are typically reserved for African Americans, and that the sudden redirection of violence towards young women, specifically young white women, indicates a significant shift.
“It says something profound about the desperate state of rage and alienation and violence,” said Nelson. “Ironically, the police violence, mass arrests, and overall ineptitude have done wonders for OWS in terms of getting the message and images out to a national and international audience.”
Politicians have become widely divided on the subject of Occupy Wall Street, with some, like Nancy Pelosi ,openly lauding the efforts of protestors, and others, like Bloomberg, citing the disruption to business as an unacceptable consequence.
"If you focus for example on driving the banks out of New York City, you know those are our jobs," said Bloomberg on his weekly radio show. “What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have.”
GOP hopeful Hermain Cain took a slightly more tactful approach saying that he sympathized with protestors who couldn’t find work, but that they needed to lobby in Washington, not on Wall St.
President Obama acknowledged the frustrations of protestors and the overall impact that the financial crisis has had on the American People, pledging to do his part to crack down on abusive practices in the banking industry. But he also invoked the important role banking institutions play in the economy.
We need them to help do what traditionally banks and financial services are supposed to be doing, which is providing business and families resources to make productive investments that will actually build the economy,” said President Obama.” But until the American people see that happening, yes, they are going to continue to express frustrations about what they see as two sets of rules.”
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Internship Feature
Intense debate swirled around the blogosphere last spring following the conclusion of an online charity auction. The event, hosted by the Manhattan-based website Charity Buzz, was held in benefit of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights; the scandal arose after an anonymous bidder snapped up the evening’s prize for a cool $42,500.
The auction’s hosts had not exaggerated when they called their prize “a dream package.” But it was not a celebrated piece of art, or a luxury sports car. It was most certainly not an exotic vacation.
It was an unpaid, one-week internship at Vogue, and it had been donated by reigning fashion titan, Anna Wintour.
Charity Buzz, the company responsible for auctioning off a growing number of internships including the one donated by Ms. Wintour, is a prime example of the rising value of unpaid internships.
The company, which launched in 2004 and now includes a staff of over 40 people, describes their mission as pursuing “increasingly cutting-edge ways to harness technology and pop-culture to benefit our nonprofit partners and provide even greater opportunities for our bidders.”
At any given time their website offers a slew of high profile internships from magazines like Rolling Stone and Harpers Bazaar, to fashion houses like Versace and Diane Von Furstenberg, and even to brokerage firms like Cantor Fitzgerald.
For overzealous parents, Charity Buzz represents yet another new way to pave the way for their offspring. In a 2008 article by The New York Times entitled “To the Highest Bidder”, Kathi Cline of Tuxedo Park, NY described the $4,500 internship she purchased at Harper’s Bazaar through Charity Buzz—a Christmas gift for her stepdaughter—as a way to narrow down her career path.
“She wants to go into the fashion industry, but she’s not sure what aspect she wanted,” said Cline.
The Times article did not pass by without receiving its share of moral indignation. An essay by Anthony Paletta posted just two days later, to the website “Minding the Campus, challenged that internship auctions were just one of many increasingly elitist (or as Paletta says, “bizarre”) practices aimed at getting the children of wealthy parents into the best colleges possible.
“At least the auction is admirably direct,” wrote Paletta. “It makes no pretense of rewarding merit, highly unlike the countless internships gained through nepotism that now masquerade as genuine accomplishment.”
For several years now, insiders and observers alike have called the state of the publishing industry a “crisis.” Even amidst claims that the industry has started to rebound, The Pew Research Center came out with a report this year, which found that, “circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%” in 2010.
But while the bad economy has led to a shortage of jobs, it has not led to a shortage of internships. Nicole Wolfrath, Associate Director of Internships and Career Services at The New School, said that on the contrary, she witnessed an increase in the number of internship offerings this year, an effect she attributes to company downsizing.
“Basically the roles of interns have changed due to company layoffs,” said Wolfrath. “I've read an example of a full time position being eliminated and responsibilities spread amongst two newly developed unpaid internships.”
Such examples, though they undoubtedly occur, breach national regulations aimed at protecting interns from exploitation. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor revised its factsheet for unpaid internships, adding a new caveat that interns must not be permitted to displace regular employees, and must be supervised by the existing staff.
Their factsheet also includes two other regularly flouted guidelines: that intern responsibilities should be similar to training that could be received in an educational setting, and that the internship employer should not directly benefit from activities of the intern.
But in practice, employers often use interns to complete necessary tasks that would ordinarily be designated to employees, minus the pay.
“College career centers have expressed concern that students are being treated as employees but not compensated as such,” said Wolfrath.
Caylin Harris, an Editorial Assistant at Good Housekeeping and Director of the “60 Minute Mentor Program” at the website Ed2010, described internships as increasingly crucial, especially in industries like publishing.
Part of Harris’s job at Ed2010 is to pair up recent graduates with mentors in the magazine industry and to dispatch career advice. Harris observed that it has now become common for people striving for a career in journalism to pursue internships even after graduating college.
Unlike most career and internship counselors, Harris’s knowledge comes from personal experience. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse in 2009, Harris found herself in what has today become a routine predicament—armed with a diploma, but lacking any immediate job prospects.
In total, she completed four internships after graduating (while living at home, and babysitting in her spare time), at magazines that included The Week, Pilates Style, Parents Magazine, and W. Rather than being remorseful about the bleak situation, Harris viewed the challenge as an opportunity to prove her commitment and work ethic to those who could vouch for her in the future .
“I sort of looked at it as, ‘It’s a horrible economy, people that are really talented are losing their jobs and I just need to do whatever I can to prove that I really want to be here, and I really want to be doing this’,” said Harris.
“I’ve seen people that have graduated doing internships, and honestly I think it’s a smart thing, because it keeps you in the industry,” she added. “It keeps you around people that, if you do a great job and you work really hard, you know you’ll hopefully at least make a good impression on.”
“From a counselor’s perspective, I can tell you that I've seen many post graduates open to interning since securing full time positions are difficult,” said Wolfrath of The New School. “There are many graduate students with tons of experience similar to alums. All of these individuals are applying for the same internships undergraduates are.”
Harris reaffirmed that increased competition has led to a steady rise in the number of internships that are considered “standard” during college—from 1 or 2, 10 years ago to 5,6, or even 7, now.
But when asked about company downsizing, Harris denied having heard about jobs being outright replaced by interns, though she did concede that many interns are now being assigned greater responsibilities due to the bad economy.
“There might be less [Editorial Assistants] at a magazine, or they’re using more interns,” said Harris. “I think maybe interns are just getting the opportunity to have more responsibility, because there’s more work and less people.”
“Obviously yes, it’s important to get good grades, and it’s important to graduate from school,” said Harris. “But at the same time, I feel like the people that hired me today didn’t care about what my GPA was; they wanted to know where I had been an intern.”
Charity Buzz did not respond to inquiries for this article.
The auction’s hosts had not exaggerated when they called their prize “a dream package.” But it was not a celebrated piece of art, or a luxury sports car. It was most certainly not an exotic vacation.
It was an unpaid, one-week internship at Vogue, and it had been donated by reigning fashion titan, Anna Wintour.
Charity Buzz, the company responsible for auctioning off a growing number of internships including the one donated by Ms. Wintour, is a prime example of the rising value of unpaid internships.
The company, which launched in 2004 and now includes a staff of over 40 people, describes their mission as pursuing “increasingly cutting-edge ways to harness technology and pop-culture to benefit our nonprofit partners and provide even greater opportunities for our bidders.”
At any given time their website offers a slew of high profile internships from magazines like Rolling Stone and Harpers Bazaar, to fashion houses like Versace and Diane Von Furstenberg, and even to brokerage firms like Cantor Fitzgerald.
For overzealous parents, Charity Buzz represents yet another new way to pave the way for their offspring. In a 2008 article by The New York Times entitled “To the Highest Bidder”, Kathi Cline of Tuxedo Park, NY described the $4,500 internship she purchased at Harper’s Bazaar through Charity Buzz—a Christmas gift for her stepdaughter—as a way to narrow down her career path.
“She wants to go into the fashion industry, but she’s not sure what aspect she wanted,” said Cline.
The Times article did not pass by without receiving its share of moral indignation. An essay by Anthony Paletta posted just two days later, to the website “Minding the Campus, challenged that internship auctions were just one of many increasingly elitist (or as Paletta says, “bizarre”) practices aimed at getting the children of wealthy parents into the best colleges possible.
“At least the auction is admirably direct,” wrote Paletta. “It makes no pretense of rewarding merit, highly unlike the countless internships gained through nepotism that now masquerade as genuine accomplishment.”
For several years now, insiders and observers alike have called the state of the publishing industry a “crisis.” Even amidst claims that the industry has started to rebound, The Pew Research Center came out with a report this year, which found that, “circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%” in 2010.
But while the bad economy has led to a shortage of jobs, it has not led to a shortage of internships. Nicole Wolfrath, Associate Director of Internships and Career Services at The New School, said that on the contrary, she witnessed an increase in the number of internship offerings this year, an effect she attributes to company downsizing.
“Basically the roles of interns have changed due to company layoffs,” said Wolfrath. “I've read an example of a full time position being eliminated and responsibilities spread amongst two newly developed unpaid internships.”
Such examples, though they undoubtedly occur, breach national regulations aimed at protecting interns from exploitation. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor revised its factsheet for unpaid internships, adding a new caveat that interns must not be permitted to displace regular employees, and must be supervised by the existing staff.
Their factsheet also includes two other regularly flouted guidelines: that intern responsibilities should be similar to training that could be received in an educational setting, and that the internship employer should not directly benefit from activities of the intern.
But in practice, employers often use interns to complete necessary tasks that would ordinarily be designated to employees, minus the pay.
“College career centers have expressed concern that students are being treated as employees but not compensated as such,” said Wolfrath.
Caylin Harris, an Editorial Assistant at Good Housekeeping and Director of the “60 Minute Mentor Program” at the website Ed2010, described internships as increasingly crucial, especially in industries like publishing.
Part of Harris’s job at Ed2010 is to pair up recent graduates with mentors in the magazine industry and to dispatch career advice. Harris observed that it has now become common for people striving for a career in journalism to pursue internships even after graduating college.
Unlike most career and internship counselors, Harris’s knowledge comes from personal experience. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse in 2009, Harris found herself in what has today become a routine predicament—armed with a diploma, but lacking any immediate job prospects.
In total, she completed four internships after graduating (while living at home, and babysitting in her spare time), at magazines that included The Week, Pilates Style, Parents Magazine, and W. Rather than being remorseful about the bleak situation, Harris viewed the challenge as an opportunity to prove her commitment and work ethic to those who could vouch for her in the future .
“I sort of looked at it as, ‘It’s a horrible economy, people that are really talented are losing their jobs and I just need to do whatever I can to prove that I really want to be here, and I really want to be doing this’,” said Harris.
“I’ve seen people that have graduated doing internships, and honestly I think it’s a smart thing, because it keeps you in the industry,” she added. “It keeps you around people that, if you do a great job and you work really hard, you know you’ll hopefully at least make a good impression on.”
“From a counselor’s perspective, I can tell you that I've seen many post graduates open to interning since securing full time positions are difficult,” said Wolfrath of The New School. “There are many graduate students with tons of experience similar to alums. All of these individuals are applying for the same internships undergraduates are.”
Harris reaffirmed that increased competition has led to a steady rise in the number of internships that are considered “standard” during college—from 1 or 2, 10 years ago to 5,6, or even 7, now.
But when asked about company downsizing, Harris denied having heard about jobs being outright replaced by interns, though she did concede that many interns are now being assigned greater responsibilities due to the bad economy.
“There might be less [Editorial Assistants] at a magazine, or they’re using more interns,” said Harris. “I think maybe interns are just getting the opportunity to have more responsibility, because there’s more work and less people.”
“Obviously yes, it’s important to get good grades, and it’s important to graduate from school,” said Harris. “But at the same time, I feel like the people that hired me today didn’t care about what my GPA was; they wanted to know where I had been an intern.”
Charity Buzz did not respond to inquiries for this article.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike? (Draft 2)
Article 2- Revised Second Draft
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike?
WC: 677
While the rest of New York City is stocking up on candy and other indulgent treats for Halloween, the “People’s Kitchen” at Zuccotti Park—the culinary base of the Occupy Wall Street protest—will actually be scaling back its food distribution for the weekend.
In what the OWS protest has labeled an effort to “strengthen” their operations, they will be reducing the daily meals they provide for free over the next three days, to more austere fare like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, and rice and beans.
Although the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going on for over a month, has received significant media attention for its cosmopolitan cuisine—one article by the The New York Times asked, “Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting”—organizers within the movement say that the energy currently required by the kitchen to feed protesters cannot continue at the same rate.
“Hello Occupiers and Friends!,” states a laminated flyer that is taped to a plastic folding table in the OWS kitchen. “In the coming days the People’s Kitchen of Occupy Wall Street will be initiating some changes to help us better fulfill our mission to feed the movement.”
But their public claims to the contrary have not stopped the press from reporting the move as an effort to stave off freeloaders. In an October 27th article by The Atlantic Wire, organizer Chris O’Donnell responded by saying, "I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned about 'freeloaders.’”
One member of the OWS kitchen, however, a volunteer named Nan Terrie, said that kicking out freeloaders is one of the aims of the People’s Kitchen.
Terrie, who has been volunteering in the kitchen since the start of the protest, described security issues at the kitchen as downplayed by the press and protest’s organizers.
Aside from dealing with daily grievances from visitors, such as griping and cutting in line, Terrie said that she was recently threatened by a patron who got angry at the kitchen staff for not catering to his needs. Terrie said that when she refused to make the man a special rice krispie snack, he pulled a knife on her, “and called [her] the ‘N word’ several times."
Benedict Clouette, a worker in the People’s Kitchen, voiced assurance that Terrie’s concerns were not shared among the staff. “That’s not really the dominant tenor of the kitchen now,” said Clouette in a phone interview.
Clouette, who reaffirmed that the decision to scale back on food was not a strike, described the primary motivations as streamlining the kitchen, and giving organizers space to reflect on what direction the protest is headed in.
“Right now there’s a huge amount of energy that just goes into running it every day, and in the morning we don’t know who’s going to volunteer to cook,” said Clouette. “That’s not really a sustainable practice.”
When asked whether the Occupy Wall Street protest would be able to operate in the event that the kitchen was closed, Clouette hesitated. “I think the whole shape of the thing would probably change,” he said.
Jeremy Varon, an associate professor of history at The New School who studies American political movements of the 60s and 70s and has written a book on the topic, said that shutting down the OWS kitchen would weaken the movement, both from a practical standpoint, as well as a symbolic one.
“At one level, folks need to eat, right? And the ability to offer food helps enable a permanent presence of people there,” said Varon. “Second, it is part of an effort to demonstrate that the encampment has the creativity, organization, and discipline to provide for itself.”
But Varon was careful to add that the practical strain of feeding a community is not something that the Occupy Wall Street protest can bear on its own.
“The very fact that there are homeless folks buzzing around the park is evidence of the problems if the US economy,” added Varon. “But it is unrealistic to believe OWS can, in itself, remedy those.”
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike?
WC: 677
While the rest of New York City is stocking up on candy and other indulgent treats for Halloween, the “People’s Kitchen” at Zuccotti Park—the culinary base of the Occupy Wall Street protest—will actually be scaling back its food distribution for the weekend.
In what the OWS protest has labeled an effort to “strengthen” their operations, they will be reducing the daily meals they provide for free over the next three days, to more austere fare like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, and rice and beans.
Although the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going on for over a month, has received significant media attention for its cosmopolitan cuisine—one article by the The New York Times asked, “Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting”—organizers within the movement say that the energy currently required by the kitchen to feed protesters cannot continue at the same rate.
“Hello Occupiers and Friends!,” states a laminated flyer that is taped to a plastic folding table in the OWS kitchen. “In the coming days the People’s Kitchen of Occupy Wall Street will be initiating some changes to help us better fulfill our mission to feed the movement.”
But their public claims to the contrary have not stopped the press from reporting the move as an effort to stave off freeloaders. In an October 27th article by The Atlantic Wire, organizer Chris O’Donnell responded by saying, "I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned about 'freeloaders.’”
One member of the OWS kitchen, however, a volunteer named Nan Terrie, said that kicking out freeloaders is one of the aims of the People’s Kitchen.
Terrie, who has been volunteering in the kitchen since the start of the protest, described security issues at the kitchen as downplayed by the press and protest’s organizers.
Aside from dealing with daily grievances from visitors, such as griping and cutting in line, Terrie said that she was recently threatened by a patron who got angry at the kitchen staff for not catering to his needs. Terrie said that when she refused to make the man a special rice krispie snack, he pulled a knife on her, “and called [her] the ‘N word’ several times."
Benedict Clouette, a worker in the People’s Kitchen, voiced assurance that Terrie’s concerns were not shared among the staff. “That’s not really the dominant tenor of the kitchen now,” said Clouette in a phone interview.
Clouette, who reaffirmed that the decision to scale back on food was not a strike, described the primary motivations as streamlining the kitchen, and giving organizers space to reflect on what direction the protest is headed in.
“Right now there’s a huge amount of energy that just goes into running it every day, and in the morning we don’t know who’s going to volunteer to cook,” said Clouette. “That’s not really a sustainable practice.”
When asked whether the Occupy Wall Street protest would be able to operate in the event that the kitchen was closed, Clouette hesitated. “I think the whole shape of the thing would probably change,” he said.
Jeremy Varon, an associate professor of history at The New School who studies American political movements of the 60s and 70s and has written a book on the topic, said that shutting down the OWS kitchen would weaken the movement, both from a practical standpoint, as well as a symbolic one.
“At one level, folks need to eat, right? And the ability to offer food helps enable a permanent presence of people there,” said Varon. “Second, it is part of an effort to demonstrate that the encampment has the creativity, organization, and discipline to provide for itself.”
But Varon was careful to add that the practical strain of feeding a community is not something that the Occupy Wall Street protest can bear on its own.
“The very fact that there are homeless folks buzzing around the park is evidence of the problems if the US economy,” added Varon. “But it is unrealistic to believe OWS can, in itself, remedy those.”
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