Wednesday, October 26, 2011


I wrote a piece for teamawesomenyc.com called Morning at Zuccotti Park about the Occupy Wall Street movement. I edited some of the video footage I got to the tune of Anisette, a song I of mine from when I was in a band called The Habit. The music is circa 2000 and features Alexander Torres on vocals and bass, Joshua Robinson on drums and me on guitar. The guy who does most of the talking is Michael Angelo Bosch, an activist with a very informative website, michaelangelobosch.com. Below is an excerpt from the article. To see the whole thing go to teamawesomenyc.com (it should be up soon):

"So what is happening in this country that we need to change? As I understand journalism, a blog entry is an opinion piece, so here are a few ranting paragraphs filled with my own opinion (it’s a sort of a landslide so brace yourselves):

A man in a Guy Fawkes mask held up a sign by the entrance at the lowest point of Zuccotti Park, by the Freedom Tower site. It read: “What is our Demand? Better Health Care, Decent Wages, Stop High Mortgages, No More Rent Hikes, Racial and Sexual Equality, Leaders that Represent the People, No More Useless Wars, Balance the F**king Budget, Education + More.” I would have easily dismissed such a list of demands as too general, a “sludge” of “every left-wing cause,” as Fox News producer Jesse Watters said on the O’Rilley Factor. I would have rationalized that it’s not so simple, although having no training in economics none of this can possibly be simple to me. It would have been easy to do that if a few of these topics did not incidentally drop into my life around this time:

Rent Hikes. I left the ghetto a year ago even though our landlord offered us a lease without an increase. I didn’t realize how “gracious” this was until this year, though even if I had I still wouldn’t have put up with death-threats from our drunk neighbors who were simply drowning their disappointments in their own way... This year our rent went up. My salary did not. It hasn’t in almost four years. I’m young, so this was the first time I realized how important a cost of living yearly increase is. We asked for a raise at work and were told that because of the economy, nobody is getting one. I did the research, and as far as our income bracket was concerned, they were right. “Decent Wages” - check.

I called the landlord and told her this, and she said that it’s not up to them. The Rent Control Board has authorized the rent hike. I guess it seemed obvious to her that she would increase the rent as much as she could, and although she took ten dollars off upon my phone call, it still went up. So here is a government commission authorizing owners to increase rent every year regardless of the economy and the interests of those affected by it. “Leadership that Represents the People” - check.

New York has a constant flow of wide-eyed youngsters who are willing to pay too much to get to live here, until they realize in a year that they can’t afford to, so the market is flooded. Much like the New York tour-bus industry, of which I was a part of, landlords don’t need to provide good customer service - the hype of the city itself assures anyone who has the capital to get into that kind of industry can do what they want. So much for the free market’s self regulation. And speaking of raises, the very employees we bailed out with our taxes, bank CEOs, are getting bonuses again. Phew. Enough about the issues. Back to the magic of Occupy Wall Street."

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