Power to the People: Occupy’s afterlife — a dispatch from New York’s dark zones
New York’s inequality is not a secret to anyone who walks its streets, let alone struggles to pay its rents. Our billionaire mayor seemed to be out to prove a point this week, acting like a petulant child when public opinion pushed him to cancel the New York City Marathon this weekend, while people still have no power, food, and in too many cases lost everything in floods or fires.
Power to the People: Occupy’s afterlife — a dispatch from New York’s dark zones
by Sarah Jaffe
Jacobin magazine
New York’s inequality is not a secret to anyone who walks its streets, let alone struggles to pay its rents. Our billionaire mayor seemed to be out to prove a point this week, acting like a petulant child when public opinion pushed him to cancel the New York City Marathon this weekend, while people still have no power, food, and in too many cases lost everything in floods or fires.
For those of us who’ve spent the last few years covering the struggles of everyday people against the financial and corporate giants who’ve consolidated wealth to unheard-of levels, this week has been an exercise in “Where the hell have you been?” After Hurricane Katrina, which I watched from hundreds of miles away, people declared over and over “It’s like a third world country.”
Those of us who’d lived in and loved that city didn’t need a storm to tell us what it was like.
