Wall Street: You’ve Got Hate Mail
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on October 30th, 2011 4:42 am by HL
Wall Street: You’ve Got Hate Mail
Some 400 Occupy Wall Street protesters got into costume Friday, but the occasion wasn’t an early observance of the beloved pagan-inspired holiday that is Halloween. Rather, the messengers from among OWS ranks paid visits to big bank headquarters in Manhattan to deliver mail from thousands of Americans who claim to have been negatively impacted by the financial shenanigans that contributed to the Great Recession. AP via CBS News: One group of protesters headed down a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, chanting, “You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!” About 50 police officers accompanied them, on foot and in vehicles. The marchers stopped at a Citigroup office on Park Avenue. A building employee accepted a few letters but declined the rest. So the marchers folded them into paper airplanes and tossed them at a Citibank sign out front. One message, from LaShuna Garcia, in the Tucson, Ariz., area, told how her parents lost their jobs through downsizing and budget cuts. “Savings are difficult to accrue when the ends don’t even come close to meeting,” Garcia’s letter said. “Please help keep the American people alive.” Jeremy Wattles, in the Geneva, N.Y., area, wrote that he was concerned about a U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing the free speech rights of corporations, which many protesters say has encouraged corporate campaign donations. Read more
Some 400 Occupy Wall Street protesters got into costume Friday, but the occasion wasn’t an early observance of the beloved pagan-inspired holiday that is Halloween. Rather, the messengers from among OWS ranks paid visits to big bank headquarters in Manhattan to deliver mail from thousands of Americans who claim to have been negatively impacted by the financial shenanigans that contributed to the Great Recession.
AP via CBS News:
One group of protesters headed down a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, chanting, “You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!” About 50 police officers accompanied them, on foot and in vehicles.
The marchers stopped at a Citigroup office on Park Avenue. A building employee accepted a few letters but declined the rest. So the marchers folded them into paper airplanes and tossed them at a Citibank sign out front.
One message, from LaShuna Garcia, in the Tucson, Ariz., area, told how her parents lost their jobs through downsizing and budget cuts.
“Savings are difficult to accrue when the ends don’t even come close to meeting,” Garcia’s letter said. “Please help keep the American people alive.”
Jeremy Wattles, in the Geneva, N.Y., area, wrote that he was concerned about a U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing the free speech rights of corporations, which many protesters say has encouraged corporate campaign donations.
Portraits of Misery in Coachella
For those who live there, life at the wrong end of Avenue 54 in Southern California’s eastern Coachella Valley is a hot, rotting hell. As you head east, the “Bermuda shorts, putting greens and picture-window champagne dinners” found in abundance near the Arnold Palmer Golf Course give way to “arsenic-tainted water, frequent blackouts and raw sewage that backs up into the shower.” With this unflinching look at the lives of those who barely survive in the Coachella region, California Watch reporter Patricia Leigh Brown does honor to the withered tradition of no-frills investigation into the condition of the American dispossessed—people who appear to have been forgotten by much of the nation during the course of the latest great neoliberal race to the top. —Alexander Reed Kelly California Watch: Israel and Fatima Gutierrez – the parents of Neftoli, 7, and Alexis, 5, and residents of the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park – live the nightmare daily. The vinyl floors of their disintegrating trailer, which they rent, are dimpled with moisture. Plywood covers holes where windows once were, affixed with duct tape to walls in a slow state of collapse. Rats are a constant presence; sometimes, frogs make their way through the pipes. An extension cord leads from a single light bulb hanging from the bedroom ceiling to a socket with exposed wires. “Sometimes, the niños shock themselves and scream,” Israel Gutierrez said. In the tumbledown warrens of America’s pre-fab favelas – California’s Third World – the 20th century is a dim memory. Basic needs like potable water, safe and reliable electricity, rudimentary sanitation, and clean air can go unmet. Read more
For those who live there, life at the wrong end of Avenue 54 in Southern California’s eastern Coachella Valley is a hot, rotting hell. As you head east, the “Bermuda shorts, putting greens and picture-window champagne dinners” found in abundance near the Arnold Palmer Golf Course give way to “arsenic-tainted water, frequent blackouts and raw sewage that backs up into the shower.”
With this unflinching look at the lives of those who barely survive in the Coachella region, California Watch reporter Patricia Leigh Brown does honor to the withered tradition of no-frills investigation into the condition of the American dispossessed—people who appear to have been forgotten by much of the nation during the course of the latest great neoliberal race to the top. —Alexander Reed Kelly
California Watch:
Israel and Fatima Gutierrez – the parents of Neftoli, 7, and Alexis, 5, and residents of the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park – live the nightmare daily.
The vinyl floors of their disintegrating trailer, which they rent, are dimpled with moisture. Plywood covers holes where windows once were, affixed with duct tape to walls in a slow state of collapse. Rats are a constant presence; sometimes, frogs make their way through the pipes. An extension cord leads from a single light bulb hanging from the bedroom ceiling to a socket with exposed wires.
“Sometimes, the niños shock themselves and scream,” Israel Gutierrez said.
In the tumbledown warrens of America’s pre-fab favelas – California’s Third World – the 20th century is a dim memory. Basic needs like potable water, safe and reliable electricity, rudimentary sanitation, and clean air can go unmet.