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POLICE ARREST MORE THAN 700 PROTESTERS ON BROOKLYN BRIDGE

October 1, 2011

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By AL BAKER, COLIN MOYNIHAN and SARAH MASLIN NIR

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http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/police-arresting-protesters-on-brooklyn-bridge/?hp

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THOUSANDS MARCH ON BOSTON, 24 ARRESTED
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By Agency France-Presse

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http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/7669-thousands-march-in-boston-24-arrested

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WALL STREET PROTESTS: WHICH SIDES ARE YOU ON? 
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By Van Jones and Max Berger, Reader Supported News

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/7670-wall-street-protests-which-side-are-you-on

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Wall Street has long been the home of the biggest threat to American Democracy. Now it has become home to what may be our best hope for rescuing it.

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For everyone who loves this country, for everyone whose heart is breaking for the growing ranks of the poor, for everyone who is seething at the unopposed demolition of America’s working and middle class: the time has come to get off the fence.

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A new generation has gone to the scene of the crimes committed against our future. The time has come for all people of good will to give our full-throated backing to the young people of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The young heroes on Wall Street today baffle the world because they have issued no demands. The villains of Wall Street had their demands – insisting upon a massive bailout for themselves in 2008, while they pocketed million dollar bonuses. The Wall Street protesters are not seeking a bailout for themselves; they are working to bail out democracy.

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The American experiment in self-governance is at a moment of crisis. The political system thus far has proven itself incapable of responding to a once in a lifetime economic calamity. With income inequality and unemployment at the highest rates since the Great Depression, it’s no wonder that almost 80 percent of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track.

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But the crisis of American Democracy did not start with the financial collapse. For at least 30 years, the system has been rigged by the wealthy and privileged to acquire more wealth and privilege. At this point, 400 families control more wealth than 180 million Americans.

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This great wealth divergence has resulted in an unjust and dangerous concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few. It has pushed millions – especially the rising generation and communities of color – into the shadows of our society. The middle class continues to shrink, and the ranks of the poor have swelled. The political elite has failed to take the necessary steps to provide opportunity to the majority of Americans.

A movement was born after Madison, Wisconsin, to oppose these injustices. It has now spread to every Congressional District. We call ourselves the American Dream Movement. We engaged 130,000 people to crowd-source our own jobs agenda – the Contract for the American Dream. In August, tens of thousands demonstrated for jobs in rallies across the nation. Next week in DC, we host our first national gathering: the Take Back The American Dream conference.

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The Occupation of Wall Street – and the occupations throughout the country – are expressions of the same spirit and dynamic. And these particular demonstrations, perhaps uniquely, contain the spark to grow into a movement that can be transformative. They are the first, small step in the creation of a movement that can restore American Democracy, and renew the American Dream.

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The hundreds of young people from all five boroughs that camp out every night, in the heart of the financial district, in the rain and the cold, at risk of arrest, are providing the inspiration to draw more and more out of the shadows and into the bright light of the public square. The occupation grows larger and more diverse every day. Young people, the majority of whom are under 25 and have never before engaged in activism, are managing the arduous task of a consensus rules meeting with no sound system. The nightly general assemblies are attracting crowds in the thousands to stand amongst a group of their peers and debate our path forward as a people.

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The occupation is a revival of a proud tradition of authentic, people-powered movements that have been dormant – and that we need now more than ever. It is building into the kind of massive public demonstrations – like those in Egypt, Madison, and Santiago – that can shake the foundation of a system of power that has lost sight of the public good.

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Now is our time to choose. Will we keep rewarding those whose financial manipulations have brought us to ruin? Or will we stand with those whose democratic innovations are breathing life into our finest ideals? Both groups are within blocks of each other in downtown Manhattan.

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For the past 30 years, the country has stood behind the titans on Wall Street and their values. We listened when they said that their banks were too big too fail. Today, there is only one thing that’s too big to fail: the dreams of this new generation, finding its voice in Liberty Park. All of America should now stand with them.

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PROTEST CLOSES OFF WALL STREET ROADS

September 19, 2011

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by Pervaiz Shallwani and Jessica Firger


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576579291495261236.html

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A social media-fueled protest against U.S. banking institutions brought hundreds of demonstrators this weekend to Manhattan’s Financial District, organizers said Sunday. New York City Police said the protest could cause access to Wall Street to be restricted Monday morning.

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Blocked from Wall Street by police, demonstrators hunkered down in tents in Liberty Plaza, with sleeping bags and boxes of food.

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“The method of protest that we’re using, the purpose is to interrupt the flow of Wall Street,” said Joe Sharkey, 30 years old, a free-lance designer from Bedford-Stuyvesant who showed up at the protest Sunday and attended planning meetings. He said Monday was going to be the group’s “crucial period.”

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“We are going to ride and coordinate and communicate,” Mr. Sharkey said. “The process takes a long time.”

A law-enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said the demonstration has remained largely peaceful. Two men were arrested Saturday afternoon for disorderly conduct; police said they were loitering while wearing bandanas over their faces and yelling about corporate corruption.

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The official said police were prepared for the protests, bulking up manpower and closing off streets in advance. Over the weekend, police blocked off entrances to Wall Street at William Street and Broadway to the east and west, the corner of Pine and Nassau streets to the north and Broad and Beaver streets to the south.

“No one who doesn’t have legitimate business or live on Wall Street is allowed past barricades,” the official said.

While the group has no permit to demonstrate in the area, they are “currently allowing them to peacefully demonstrate,” though that could change as needed, the official said.

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Street closures will remain fluid Monday depending on if they are needed, the official said.

The demonstration is an outgrowth of an article titled #OccupyWallStreet on Adbusters, a nonprofit ant consumer organization that runs a magazine.

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Groups such as NYC General Assembly and U.S. Day of Rage spent months using social-media sites like Twitter to draw as many 20,000 people to Wall Street. The numbers fell far short over the weekend. By Sunday, there were a few hundred.

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The protesters have made Zuccotti Park and Liberty Plaza their home base, where they keep food and sleeping bags and have “General Assembly” meetings about how to present their diverse views to the public.

There is an area for sign-making. Some read: “No such thing as too big to fail” and “Evict the banks.”

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BUYING LOCAL: HOW IT BOOSTS THE ECONOMY

Thursday, Jun. 11, 2009

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By Judith D. Schwartz

 

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1903632,00.html

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“Buy Local”—you see the decal in the store window, the sign at the farmer’s market, the bright, cheerful logos for Local First Arizona, Think Boise First, Our Milwaukee, and homegrown versions across the states. The apparent message is “let’s-support-local-business”, a kind of community boosterism. But buying close to home may be more than a feel-good, it’s-worth-paying-more-for-local matter. A number of researchers and organizations are taking a closer look at how money flows, and what they’re finding shows the profound economic impact of keeping money in town—and how the fate of many communities around the nation and the world increasingly depend on it.

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At the most basic level, when you buy local more money stays in the community. The New Economics Foundation, an independent economic think tank based in London, compared what happens when people buy produce at a supermarket vs. a local farmer’s market or community supported agriculture (CSA) program and found that twice the money stayed in the community when folks bought locally. “That means those purchases are twice as efficient in terms of keeping the local economy alive,” says author and NEF researcher David Boyle.

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Indeed, says Boyle, many local economies are languishing not because too little cash comes in, but as a result of what happens to that money. “Money is like blood. It needs to keep moving around to keep the economy going,” he says, noting that when money is spent elsewhere—at big supermarkets, non-locally owned utilities and other services such as on-line retailers—”it flows out, like a wound.” By shopping at the corner store instead of the big box, consumers keep their communities from becoming what the NEF calls “ghost towns” (areas devoid of neighborhood shops and services) or “clone towns”, where Main Street now looks like every other Main Street with the same fast-food and retail chains.

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According to Susan Witt, Executive Director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, “buy local” campaigns serve another function: alerting a community about gaps in the local market. For instance, if consumers keep turning to on-line or big-box stores for a particular product—say, socks—this signals an opportunity for someone local to make and sell socks. This is the way product innovations get made, says Witt. “The local producer adds creative elements that make either the product or materials used more appropriate to the place.” For example, an area where sheep are raised might make lambs wool socks and other goods.

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The point is not that communities should suddenly seek to be self-sufficient in all ways, but rather, says Boyle, “to shift the balance. Can you produce more locally? Of course you can if the raw materials are there, and the raw materials are often human beings.”

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And what about that higher cost of local goods? After all, big-box stores got to be big because their prices are low. Susan Witt says that the difference falls away once you consider the increase in local employment as well as the relationships that grow when people buy from people they know. (Plus, one could argue, lower transportation, and therefore environmental, costs, and you know what you’re getting—which as we’ve recently seen with suspected contamination in toys and other products from China, can be a concern.)

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There’s also the matter of local/regional resilience. Says Witt: “While now we’re largely a service-providing nation, we’re still just a generation away from being a nation of producers. The question is: what economic framework will help us reclaim those skills and that potential.” Say, for example, the exchange rates change or the price of oil rises (and it has started to creep up, if not at last summer’s pace) so that foreign-made goods are no longer cheap to import. We could find ourselves doubly stuck because domestic manufacturing is no longer set up to make all these products. While no community functions in isolation, supporting local trade helps “recreate the diversity of small businesses that are flexible and can adjust” to changing needs and market conditions, says Witt.

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Another argument for buying local is that it enhances the “velocity” of money, or circulation speed, in the area. The idea is that if currency circulates more quickly, the money passes through more hands—and more people have had the benefit of the money and what it has purchased for them. “If you’re buying local and not at a chain or branch store, chances are that store is not making a huge profit,” says David Morris, Vice President of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit economic research and development organization based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. “That means more goes into input costs—supplies and upkeep, printing, advertising, paying employees—which puts that money right back in the community.”

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One way to really make sure money stays in the community is through creating a local currency. Christian Gelleri, a former Waldorf high school teacher in the Lake Chiem area in Germany, has launched a regional currency, the Chiemgauer, equivalent in value to the Euro. According to Gelleri, the Chiemgauer, accepted at more than 600 businesses in the region and with about $3,000,000 Euros worth in circulation, has three times the velocity of the Euro, circling through the economy an average of 18 times a year as opposed to 6. One reason for the fast turnaround is that the Chiemgauer is designed to encourage spending: there is a 2% demurrage fee for holding onto the bills beyond three months.

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As an economic principle, velocity has been considered a constant. According to Gelleri, it was stable in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s but starting in the ’80s velocity has decreased as more money has been diverted to the financial sector. This scenario may benefit financial centers, but money tends to drain away from other places. Gelleri says that both the Euro and the U.S. dollar have slowed way down. “In the last several months velocity has declined sharply because there’s less GDP and more money,” he says. “The money doesn’t flow. More money is being printed, but it’s not going into circulation.”

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As the nation limps through the recession, many towns and cities are hurting. “Buy-local” campaigns can help local economies withstand the downturn. Says Boyle: “For communities, this is a hopeful message in a recession because it’s not about how much money you’ve got, but how much you can keep circulating without letting it leak out.”

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ONE PATH TO BETTER JOBS: MORE DENSITY IN CITIES

September 3, 2011

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By Ryan Avent

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Ryan Avent is an economics correspondent for The Economist and author of the Kindle Single “The Gated City,” from which this essay is adapted.

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“HELL is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. He nonetheless spent much of his life in Paris, the better to interact with other French intellectuals. Cities have long been incubators and transmitters of ideas, and, correspondingly, engines of economic growth.

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That has never made the crowds less annoying. Maybe that’s why people try to tame the city by chaining it down and limiting who can build what where along its quieter streets. We lobby leaders to fight development, aiming to protect old buildings and precious views, limit crime and traffic, and maintain high-quality schools. But what makes a city a city and a not-city a not-city is the fact that a city is dense and a not-city isn’t. The idea of it may chill a homeowner’s heart, but the wealth supported by urban density is what gives urban homes their great value in the first place.

And when it comes to economic growth and the creation of jobs, the denser the city the better.

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How great are the benefits of density? Economists studying cities routinely find that after controlling for other variables, workers in denser places earn higher wages and are more productive. Some studies suggest that doubling density raises productivity by around 6 percent while others peg the impact at up to 28 percent. Some economists have concluded that more than half the variation in output per worker across the United States can be explained by density alone; density explains more of the productivity gap across states than education levels or industry concentrations or tax policies.

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Put two workers with similar skill levels in cities of different densities and the one in the denser place will be more productive, according to two decades’ worth of research from economists. The resistance to greater density slows job creation in productive places. Take, for instance, the San Francisco Bay Area, a beautiful place, blessed with outstanding climate, scenery and culture. It’s also an economic juggernaut, hub of the country’s tech industry and home to some of America’s highest wages. In 2009, the average Silicon Valley household earned about $85,000. Despite this, over 500,000 residents of the Bay Area moved elsewhere in the 2000s. Many of them left for places like Phoenix, which attracted over 500,000 residents from other American cities, despite wages 40 percent below Silicon Valley levels.

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Factors like taste and taxes account for some of the migration, but the biggest reason for the shift is housing costs. The average Phoenix home is worth about 30 percent of the price of a house in San Jose. The difference in prices is mostly due to differences in building. In every year from 1992 to 2009, Phoenix granted permits for two to three times as many new homes as did the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas combined. Around the San Francisco Bay, neighborhoods dead set against change successfully squeezed the housing supply, just as OPEC limits the supply of oil when it wishes to raise its price.

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The “Not in My Backyard” philosophy sometimes, though by no means always, supports a high quality of life.  Yet the effect is to raise housing costs and make rich cities more exclusive. Real trouble occurs when the idea-generators in cities with that NIMBY approach become so protective of their pleasant streets that they turn away other idea-generators, undermining the city’s economic role. And that is happening. Entrepreneurship rates in Silicon Valley were below the national average during the tech boom because firms couldn’t attract enough skilled workers.

Productivity and wages are rising in these growing Sunbelt cities, but not as fast as in the denser cities that workers are leaving. The average wage per job in Phoenix rose $10,700 from 2000 to 2009, while in San Francisco the increase was $14,500. But, while wages are growing in San Francisco, they would be growing faster if the city allowed the construction of more housing. More workers would be able to take advantage of the good job opportunities in the Bay Area, and the metropolitan and national economies would function better.

DENSITY isn’t a magic elixir. One can’t create wealth just by crowding people together; otherwise the super-dense metropolitan areas in emerging Asian countries would be richer than American cities. Density simply facilitates interaction. Interactions translate into wealth when a population is educated and local institutions support private enterprise and entrepreneurship.

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The world’s richest places tend to be dense, with well-educated residents and a free-market-orientation (or tax havens or oil-rich) — think of New York and the Bay Area, of Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Without a stock of skilled workers and a relatively open marketplace, density’s impact on growth and productivity will be limited.

What is it exactly that dense cities are doing? Consider a simple example. Suppose that within a population one person in 100 develops a taste for Vietnamese cuisine, and suppose that a Vietnamese restaurant needs a customer base of 1,000 people to operate profitably. In a city of 10,000 residents, there aren’t enough people to support a Vietnamese restaurant. The only restaurants that can operate profitably are those appealing to considerably more than one in 100 people — restaurants offering less daring fare. In a city of 10,000 people, there is little room for specialization, and less for experimentation.

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A city of one million people, by contrast, can support multiple Vietnamese restaurants. Not only will this larger city enjoy a specialty cuisine unavailable in less populous places, but its ability to support multiple producers of this cuisine allows for competition, improving the price and quality.

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A city with multiple Vietnamese restaurants may attract sellers of the fresh ingredients used in Vietnamese cooking, who then invest in distribution of those products in the larger city. This, in turn, attracts the sort of discerning eaters who favor authentic, high-quality Vietnamese food, reinforcing the concentration of Vietnamese eateries. The larger market facilitates competition, which again boosts quality and reduces prices. This is good for consumers. But competition also means better service from suppliers and growth in the consumer market, which is good for the restaurants. The result is a stronger, more productive and higher-quality microeconomy than in the city of 100,000, where only one Vietnamese restaurant can survive, or the town of 10,000, where there is none at all.

Density doesn’t work without talent. A small market may only support restaurants producing food that caters to a broad range of tastes. These restaurants will have to hire generalists — cooks who can produce a broad range of cuisines. Specialization and fine-tuning of one’s skills aren’t rewarded; too few patrons will have the specific taste for the particular cuisine to appreciate the quality. Time spent nailing down the nuances of one cuisine is time a chef isn’t using to maintain a good-enough command of a broad range of dishes.

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In the larger market, supporting multiple niche cuisines, the calculus is different. Because there may be multiple Vietnamese restaurants competing for patrons, mastery of that specific style is necessary to maintain an edge against the competition. This is particularly true as the concentration of Vietnamese restaurants is likely to attract devotees of the cuisine with a well-developed knowledge of and taste for it. Hence, the larger marketplace pushes for, rather than against, specialization.

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Meanwhile, a worker hoping to make a living as a Vietnamese chef will have a much easier time of things in the larger city. Labor turnover may be greater — if there’s only one Vietnamese restaurant in a town, then head-chef spots may only rarely open up — and so the odds of finding employment are higher. The larger city also provides insurance against bad fortune. If you’re a Vietnamese chef working at the one Vietnamese restaurant in a town and the one Vietnamese restaurant goes bankrupt, then you’re obviously in a tough economic situation. You must either take another job for which you’re less qualified, which may mean a reduction in compensation, or move. In the larger city, by contrast, competing restaurants can absorb and reemploy the labor and resources of defunct competitors.

This insurance function is important. It reduces the risks associated with specialization and therefore encourages more of it. By allowing workers to focus on tasks at which they’re relatively better than others, specialization helps drive economic growth. It’s also an engine of innovation. As workers focus on a specific task, they may well find better ways to do it. They might better schedule their days or invent something entirely new — software code written to expedite repeated tasks, or a machine that automates portions of a task. Of course, existing companies can be resistant to innovation. Dense cities, by acting as a source of insurance, enable workers with good ideas to take risks and start new businesses. If these workers fail, they have a good chance of finding employment elsewhere in the city. And if they succeed, the task of staffing the company is made easier by the existing pool of talent, and odds are good that customers and suppliers are close to hand, as well. Big cities provide a climate in which innovation can flourish, and in which innovators have the resources they need to exploit new ideas.

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WHAT’S true for Vietnamese cooking is true of skill-intensive industries. The American economy’s famous upward mobility rested in part on middle-class access to rich, entrepreneurial cities. This machinery is breaking down, however, mostly because upward mobility strikes too many residents of rich places as too messy a pursuit to accommodate. During the Industrial Revolution, for instance, millions of workers flooded into fast-growing cities. This produced slums, but it also allowed poor workers to take advantage of opportunities in new industries, a process that helped create the middle class.

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Rapid urban growth would mean denser neighborhoods, which makes many Americans uncomfortable. Preventing this density, however, denies workers access to the best opportunities, constraining the mechanism that helps support a strong middle class.

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We can hope that as the Phoenixes and Houstons grow and attract skilled workers, their wage levels will converge with those of the slow-growing, high-wage coastal cities. Yet that may simply encourage their residents to pull up the ladder after them as coastal residents have. Eventually, Americans will learn that if they can’t harness their cities as tools of growth and mobility, they’ll have to find costlier ways to address the country’s lingering economic ills.

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