U.S. News

Wall Street Protests Marred by Anti-Semitism

Wall Street Protests Marred by Anti-Semitism
by Seth Weiss

While the Left celebrates the Wall Street occupation with much fanfare — including endorsements from Michael Moore, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, and Susan Sarandon — an anti-Semitic undercurrent in the protests goes largely unchallenged. Consider Nathalie Rothschild’s account in the Huffington Post of the noxious response elicited by her unflattering portrait of protesters in the online journal Spiked. According to Rothschild:

I received a string of indignant emails and tweets about my Jewish, kleptocrat banking connections; demands that I reveal the details of my pay checks and that I come clean about my not-so-hidden agenda. I was told that my family name disqualifies me from having any opinion about the protest and that I have ‘the karma of a demon’. One reader posted my article online, headlining the post ‘Journalist & Jew – Nathalie ROTHSCHILD’. [1]

There have also been reports of protestors at Wall Street holding signs with clearly anti-Semitic statements; one such sign instructs passersby to search on Google for “Wall St. Jews,” “Jewish Billionaires,” and the like. [2] A recent post on the online Public Forum of the NYC General Assembly, the decentralized grouping that has emerged as the leadership of the movement, notes that “It is common for statements to be made, placing overwhelming blame and responsibility on Jews for the economic crisis” and asks “what can be done about the existence of anti-Semitic statements made by so-called supporters of the protest?” The post has received responses accusing the author of pursuing a “witch hunt” and others suggesting that readers “Look into who was involved in setting up the Federal Reserve in 1913.” [3] Read More

N.J. Students Defeat Tuition Hike, Ally with Campus Workers

by Etta Martin, Rutgers student-activist

The cost of college has risen sharply in recent years, making it much harder for young people to get access to education after high school, and making many fall back on low-level, dead-end jobs. But it wasn’t always this way. Not all that long ago, in 1996, a year at Rutgers cost only four thousand dollars, as opposed to the $12,755 it costs now.

The biggest difference is that the federal and state governments used to subsidize colleges much more, which allowed them to provide students with quality education under much less financial pressure. N.J., for instance, used to give public universities about two thirds of the cost of each student’s tuition. But from 1990 to 2009 the situation reversed: now, the state government covers only one-third of the costs, meaning that each student has to come up with the remaining two- thirds by themselves. Now, the average four-year student in America graduates $24,000 in debt.

Social programs can make higher education much cheaper, something we can access without going into debt, but an active, united student movement is the only thing that will make government officials take measures that help us, rather than helping the banks and financial institutions that profit from our debt.

To see how this can be done, let’s look at Rutgers, where a student movement recently won a major victory: a cut of hundreds of dollars from a proposed tuition hike.

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Verizon Strikers Battle Phone Company and Union

New York City – After two weeks on the picket lines, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) ordered their striking members back to work at Verizon on Aug. 20—without a contract. Three members of CWA Local 1101, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx, talked about the strike at a supporters’ meeting held the same day that the union agreed for them to return to work while bargaining continued.

Discussion at the well-attended supporters’ meeting, which included workers from other New York and New Jersey unions, ranged over many issues: whether public sentiment is for or against so-called middle-class workers (those with relatively decent wages and benefits), the long-lost concept of “no contract, no work,” and whether, as a result of the massive demonstrations in Wisconsin at the beginning of this year, there is now a new dimension to “class warfare” in which private and public sector unions are linked. Private and public workers’ mutual support appears key to reversing the push to break unions and lower workers’ standard of living.

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