Tweet
A group calling itself 99 New York is going to stage a march today in support of Occupy Wall Street. It includes UnitedNY, Strong Economy for All Coaltition, NY Communities for Change, the Working Families Party and a bunch of other community organizations. They plan to march to the homes of several Masters of the Universe and present oversized symbolic checks representing the additional monies that will begin to line the pockets of the 1% once the New York State “millionaire’s tax” expires the end of this year.
The marchers are meeting up at the corner of 59th Street and 5th Avenue at noonish. The march sets off at 12:30 after a brief rally at 59th. For non New Yorkers, this is the iconic corner in front of the Plaza Hotel at the Southeast corner of Central Park. There is a plaza out front, officially known as Grand Army Plaza with the Pulitzer Fountain at its heart, which gives the hotel its name.
There is a subway station serviced by the N, Q & R lines. There are also nearby subway stops at Columbus Circle and at the Citicorp Center that are crossroads for lots of subway lines.
From the plaza, the march will head up Fifth Avenue to Rupert Murdoch’s home between 63rd & 64th on Fifth Ave, then move on to David Koch’s residence at 71st & Fifth. Eventually they will end up at JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s home at 93rd & Park.
The weather is perfect for a brisk autumn walk. There will be speakers at each stop to explain the specifics of the huge tax windfall that each billionaire is slated to receive when New York’s millionaires tax expires on December 31st. Afterwards, the marcher will head down to Liberty Plaza—I have to assume by mass transit because I have done the walk from downtown to midtown and it’s a bit of a hike.
Doug Forand a spokesman for 99 New York (misidentified in other reporting as a spokesman for OWS) said this in an email in response to my inquiry:
Giving millionaires and billionaires a tax break when we are cutting schools, cutting services to seniors and kids, and failing to deal with our crumbling infrastructure and mass transit needs is simply wrong. While 99% of New York is being asked to tighten their belts and share in the sacrifice, the richest 1% are lining up to put more money in their pockets.
44 Comments
Thanks Cynthia, this is great news. Great title, btw.
Recommended.
Tweeted.
Remeber a while back, maybe last week, an unamed MOTU called up a finacial reporter to ask if he should be concerned for his persoanl security?
I wonder if he knew this was in the offing?
This march is not OWS, it is merely in supprt of OWS, but I hope and trust it will strictly adhere to OWS’s non violent methods.
Cynthia,
This is awesome, just awesome. I hope there is a proliferation of regular marches around the city(ies) under the general rubric of “Occupy Wall Street” or the idea of “99%”.
I visited family in New York this weekend and stopped by to take a look at Zucotti Park and my impression, as a not particularly active, but sympathetic observer is that this movement of us 99% has to make its physical presence known as much as possible, not just in that shoebox of a park.
Another impression: it freaks out the establishment. An anecdote: I was on a crosstown bus with my little kids and a well-to-do old woman struck up a conversation about kids/grandkids then, out of the blue, asked what I thought of the demonstration. I assumed she was sympathetic, then discovered she wasn’t when she mentioned her husband had worked on Wall Street for fifty years. I told her too bad: their business model is loansharking (credit cards, ARMs), counterfeiting (securitization), and forgery (robo-signing), among other fraud.
In summary, the presence of an angry 99% at the places of work, and now the doorsteps, of that 1% really bugs them.
Recommended Cynthia. Great work we are the 99%.
I just got back from Occupy St. Louis and the people there are so committed and focused. FWIW I posted a diary for the St. Louis movement. Sorry to be a blog whore but want to include it in the discussions.
http://my.firedoglake.com/popyeye99/2011/10/11/occupy-st-louis-10-10-11/
Take a listen to Laura Ingraham…I heard her a bit this am in my car….she is doing a terrific scare mongering about the danger in all of this, even just the identity of the 1%ers….She herself sounds like the threat as she ramps up the talk of danger……What a twit.
This is excellent, Cynthia, thank you! Recommended!
On Kevin’s blog of last night’s raid on Occupy Boston there was a comment about this, followed by the suggestion it would be better to tour the places of dispossession, empty storefronts and the like. I strongly disagree – this is the place to start. I am remembering an early comment as OWS began – “We know who you are, and we know what you have done.”
As the Iraq war came on, protestors marched on Rumsfeld’s Taos home and Cindy Sheehan sat outside George Bush’s gate. The homes of the 1% need to be front and center to our gaze. We know who you are and we know what you have done.
LBJ hated those people shouting outside his iron gates. It was so hard to maintain the illusion that he was beloved; took all the fun out of being president.
Doesn’t take violence. Just dispel the illusion. Good on you all.
Ah, the upper X side to downtown walk: walkable urbanism’s great blessing to the broke and near-broke Manhattanite. I hope some Occupiers try it, maybe with cushioned insoles*, as it can really get the creative juices going.
________________
* I once read an interview with the author of a walker’s guide to the lower east side, I think. His comment on the amount of tromping about that makes one expert enough for the project was that it gives a person legs of steel, and feet of clay. I’ll second that.
Now that is a post. Not that I can be there, but for those of us who live rural the people in the cities planning these things, never give us detail. Knowing which stops is great. I would love to go to DC or NY but how do I pay for it. I can drive my fuel economy car, but where do I park when I get there? long term parking is expensive. Just simple information like that would really help to grow the movement. For many of us, going to a big city is overwhelming without having to worry about such stuff.
I hope that someday, Tea Partiers will realize that the MOTU managed to privatize taxation.
Excellent idea. Hope the march gets the publicity it deserves. I am starting to read high quality letters to the editor in my local “nooz” paper, whereby citizens are writing very cogently about how badly the middle/working classes have been ripped off by the 1%.
This kind of symbolic action is serving the purpose of highlighting the situation in a very graphic and easy to understand way.
Thanks for the report about this event and best to all who are involved in it (I live way to far away to participate but wholeheartedly support the effort).
Thank you as well, brendanx. I have a very similar situation to the one you describe with the wealthy elderly woman in the tiny community where I live. It is so easy not to question where our comfort is derived, but once we do, enlightenment jarringly comes home. Flannery O’Connor was excellent in describing this kind of thing in her short stories. Best one I know on the subject is the one about Mrs. Turnip – “Revelation”. I think it describes the current shift in perception beautifully. Some of our 99% are going through this sort of thing right now – bravo for telling it like it is!
Where are you coming from?
Driving a car into New York and parking it is expensive. Hudson River bridge and tunnel tolls (only levied on inbound travel) are now an incredible $12, up from $6 just a few years ago.
Indeed. It’s ironic, saddening & maddening, that Tea Partiers, for the most part, have been so easily mis-led to be (most of them anyway) against OWS. The very early Tea Party rallies often included being against the TARP bail-outs, which they tended to blame solely & only on Obama (which was incorrect, but Obama is certainly to blame for the continuation of some similar practices).
Now that average mostly law-abiding citizens are pointing out the egregiousness of these actions, whereohwhere is the Tea Party? Whining about hippies, as usual. Wake up, Tea Party! You’re part of the 99%, as well. Ain’t no Oligarch gonna be there for you, creating a job for you or whatever.
I was walking through the park and happened to notice a bench with a plaque for Sylvia and another Madoff on it, somewhere just above the zoo, I believe.
New York is a paradise, but it’s become tainted for me, knowing where its wealthy get their wealth.
Walking is a huge benefit to both the soul (sole!) and body. Cured my back problems when I became carless. Also, the empowerment one feels from doing this cannot be described – it surpasses even bicycling, in my opinion. You walk the streets; you own them in a way the transported never do. You see things as they are, instead of whizzing past. You are there.
You might check out ridesharing as a way to get to NY/DC or even a city closer to where you live. Just do a google search. Grey Hound might be an option.
Also, I’ve never tried it, but I remember a friend of mine had great fun couch surfing. He was simply traveling.
http://www.couchsurfing.org/
But it might be something for organizers and activists in major protest cities to consider setting up directly or through some such service.
I think they are having nightmares about torches, pitchforks and tumbrels.
All caused by a repressed guilty conscience
I was kind of behind the initial spark of the tea party, but wow, how quickly it morphed into a machine for the 1%. I hope OWS is not turned into another gladiator in the coliseum.
One of the things that shocked me about DC, is how cheap it is to park there. In NYC parking in midtown can run you over $40 for a lunch event. But in DC you can park right by the Mall for under $10.
And the DC metro is fabulous.
I am a NYer and woulnd’t trade my home for anything, but it is VERY expensive to exist in Manhattan, even sleeping in the park
I hope this doesn’t backfire into a “we hate the rich” kind of thing. There are rich people and then there are the hyper rich who run things.
I don’t care how much money anyone accumulates. I only care if they got it dishonestly.
The General Assemblies of all the Occupy movements should propose a march on Washington in the near future.
It is difficult, madma – my son just had the same difficulty being from out of town and we are definitely in the lower tier of the 99%. He made the effort, and I’m proud of him for that. Maybe some tangential activity where you are is the best thing. I remember the poet Milton’s poem on his blindness which ends
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Love that one.
You want people to WALK from NYC(and other places like LA and SanFran) to DC?
wow, that’s hard core
Unfortunately many people and especially as your get close the top 1% have very compromised ethical foundations. And of course they either prefer not to think about it or just pass it off as how the game is played. There’s such a huge and corrupt machine no one seems to have the will to change it.. who can, and so it go along to get along and make the most you can and close your eyes to the ugly and the hypocrisy.
A lot of decent people at or close to the top support a corrupt unfair system and have decided to just make the most of it, the best of it. Those at the top -1%- don’t much care about anything but themselves and their greed and need to control others. It’s a real pathology… but it is neither treated as a disease or punished as a misdeed.
We have a society that has largely been consumed by thus cancer. I hope that the 99% keep sounding the message. The system is rotten. We need a new one. AmRev2. This experiment while it produced some success, some great minds and accomplishments… is a failure by any objective standard.
Exactly. And they are afraid we want to do them as they would do us if the situation was reversed. I’m tickled to be the stuff of their nightmares, even though their fears are baseless.
That’s what Thom Hartmann is trying his level best to do. He appears to be so gungho for the movement but brings up the Weather Underground whenever he can. Poisonous.
I think all that is needed is for 5, 10 or 20 million people to converge on DC or any city… that is the message that they can’t silence or arrest.
GO VIRAL: If it’s class war to be, can y’all at least publish a “Tickilist”, identifying the top 1%, individually?
I referred to Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turnip above. Of course, she is Mrs. Turpin. Here’s an extract:
“…And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they always had been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away…”
That’s what I hope for your “decent people”, SanderO. Flannery O’Connor nailed it way back when.
I keep CNBC on all day, and the Millionaire March has been their most oft-repeated story today. I guess that settles the question as to whether this march was a good idea. LMAO
If the 1% were the noble rich who promoted abstention from influence on government, aristocrats concerned for the general welfare whilst being outrageously rich on the side, we would be able to call this ‘class warfare.’ What the good citizens occupying and marching have as their fundamental concern is that Wall Street is simply the other side of Washington,DC. Wall Street writes the laws and has the power.
This is not class warfare. The OWS even kept a welcome mat for those in the 1% to come and speak. Even they could be part of this movement. The targets of today’s march have manipulated the general economy to the detriment of the general welfare. It is appropriate they be put into the public spotlight.
they need to hear:
“Hey Tea Party! Wall Street IS Govt.!”
A few weeks ago I was reading the NYT business pages and a nice, reasonable, rational middle-of-road or even slightly left of center columnist, without any portentousness, referred to “this illegitimate government”. It really stuck in my head, reading it there. He hadn’t reflected on the implications of the phrase, but I think we have.
or, 20-50k every week in every major city. That is at least more sustainable long term. Our neighborhoods, families, coworkers and all other sorts of close networks are strongest at the local. Perhaps what would be more effective is constant pressure at the local level, a strategy that aims to put pressure on, strain and ultimately break local and state governments to the point that local governments will be demanding action and reform as well from the feds. This would be a mixed bag as different dynamics played out across the country. But its worth considering a scenario in which a repeat of the massive sustained demonstrations and actions in Madison, Wisconsin played out simultaneously around the country.
I have a “suggestion”. For those of us too far away, what if we “mailed” a pair of our shoes to DC for “the march”. That could be very impressive. Send ‘em general delivery UPS to “The Mall in Washington”.
I have a “suggestion”. For those of us too far away, what if we “mailed” a pair of our shoes to DC for “the march”. That could be very impressive. Send ‘em general delivery UPS to “The Mall in Washington”.
The early actions by the October2011 group in DC were perfect messaging: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and drone-maker General Atomics have sown disdain and they reaped it last week. But – and even without its infiltration by an agent provocateur – the same group’s march on the Air and Space Museum was ill-advised. While I understand the point it attempted to make, there are countless better places in DC to make it – The Supreme Court, The Capitol, Arlington National Cemetery. Ruining the pilgrimages of everyday citizens enamored of aviation and space flight is no way to garner broad public support.
The action Cynthia reports on here is much more in line with the message, and will make a meaningful impression – on those it targets and the broader public.
Recommended.
In a building of gold, with riches untold,
lived the families on which the country was founded.
And the merchants of style, with their vain velvet smiles,
were there, for they also were hounded.
And the soft middle class crowded in to the last, for the building was fully surrounded.
And the noise outside was the ringing of revolution.
Sadly they stared and sank in their chairs
and searched for a comforting notion.
And the rich silver walls looked ready to fall
As they shook in doubtful devotion.
The ice cubes would clink as they freshened their drinks,
wet their minds in bitter emotion.
And they talked about the ringing of revolution.
“We were hardly aware of the hardships they beared,
for our time was taken with treasure.
Oh, life was a game, and work was a shame,
And pain was prevented by pleasure.
The world cold and grey, was so far away
In the distance only money could measure.”
But their thoughts were broken by the ringing of revolution.
And the clouds filled the room in darkening doom
as the crooked smoke rings were rising.
How long will it take, how can we escape
Someone asks, but no one’s advising.
And the quivering floor responds to the roar,
In a shake no longer surprising.
As closer and closer comes the ringing of revolution…
- Phil Ochs
This is an excellent idea.
Keep us posted as to how the day goes and buena suerte.
Tweetd 2 da wurldz. If you miss the march just streamed on Global Revolution, there should be a YouTube video and it should be played on GR.
Another chance to make money!
A fraction of the 1% will begin to move to a gated community while another will invest in the companies that build and service gated communities!
You need to add your march numbers to the Wiki page. So far it’s only:
Zuccotti Park/”Liberty Park”:
Several hundred “core” demonstrators
Other activity in NYC:
2,000+ marchers
(march on police headquarters, October 2, 2011)
700+ marchers
(crossing Brooklyn Bridge, October 3, 2011)
15,000+ marchers
(Lower Manhattan solidarity march, October 5, 2011)
Less than 30,000 sounds more like .001% than 99%.
The rest of the 98.999% aren’t getting credit for their support.
Why? This isn’t about asking the corrupt pols and their Corp. bosses that already own DC to change, they won’t. America has to change and then change them. We need more then swapping out one group of Corp. shills for another as we did in 2006-2008. It hasn’t worked and it won’t unless we change the rules of the game radically. 1st step IMO is to depersonalize Corps. ASAP and ban them from contributing to Political campaigns ever! Short of this nothing else will work. We need to throw the money changers out of the Temples of Democracy now or this whole exercise is a waste of time.