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Tag Archives: Occupy Wall Street

Timon of Athens, from the National Theater in London.

16-Nov-12

Nova Viçosa Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that […]

88% of the Wealth, 86% of the Taxes.

22-Nov-11

Aībak This is painfully obvious, but I see and hear the Republican talking points in many places in our society about how high a percentage of the taxes the rich have to pay.  The car mechanic in my town has a sign about how unfair it is that the top 20% pay more than 80% of […]

Greenwald on OWS.

22-Nov-11

The grievance aired by Occupy Wall Street – that we should be upset at the current economic and political system and the consistent trends of the past decade – is great Greenwald territory in general, and no one sums it up and puts in all the links quite like he does.

The more time passes…

19-Nov-11

… the more astonishingly inappropriate it seems that this is the place I went to school: The conflagration began after Princeton student Whitney Blodgett started to yell at the marchers as they passed by the bar. “We’re the 1 percent!” Blodgett yelled at them, laughing and making a thumbs up sign. “Get a job!” his […]

Maintaining a Republic.

14-Nov-11

A republic by definition depends on the existence of res publica, public property.  The existence of publicly held institutions, open to all, is the key to equality of opportunity.  As public programs will continue to face pressure from so-called Republicans, it is wise to call to mind how access to them has shaped lives.  I […]

“More unequal than Zimbabwe.”

01-Nov-11

A piece on Bridgeport, Fairfield, and Darien, in Connecticut, home to more than a million people, where the income inequality index would make it the twelfth most unequal country in the world – worse than Zimbabwe, worse than Russia, worse than Mexico, worse than Rwanda or Madagascar. As a New Yorker you grow up with […]

Saint Charles Gray of Eugene.

31-Oct-11

One of my all-time favorite people and one of the people whose example I continually return to in my thoughts – a saint indeed.  He came up in a conversation with a friend about Occupy Wall Street, so I post this fine little obituary.  I thought I had posted it before at some point, but […]

“This is the source of our problem: our leaders, our institutions.”

28-Oct-11

A decent piece – it gets better as you go along – on the growing inequality in America that has made politicians rich paid servants of the rich.  And indirectly a rebuke of Obama, who has no obvious relevance to this problem at all. Between 1979 and 2006, middle-class Americans saw their annual incomes after […]

Aristotle, Sullivan, Occupy Wall Street, and the Middle Class.

27-Oct-11

From Andrew Sullivan’s superb piece on Occupy Wall Street: There is simply a limit beyond which economic inequality threatens democratic life, when the majority suspect that a tiny minority has fixed the system beyond repair through the existing institutions, and when the powerful minority begins to think of its own interests as distinct from the […]

Down on Wall Street.

26-Oct-11

I was in New York City last weekend, and made two trips down to Wall Street to see what was going on.  I arrived first on Saturday, and found Zuccotti Park jammed.  People with signs with standing around everywhere, some signs indicating personal distress, others witty, others pithy.  One sign featured a long quotation by […]