More on #OWS; JPMorgan Chase and NYPD; etc.

(1) More pictures from my weekend in NYC Now I am able to fix the ones that are sideways! Much easier than trying to blog from my phone.

I tried to Photoshop in a smile for myself, to no avail.

I am trying to get other cool photos off my phone, including some murky shots of my trip across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday at around 6:15 in the car of WBAI host Mimi Rosenberg, just as hundreds of protesters were trapped on the Brooklyn-bound lanes and being arrested and corralled onto paddy wagons.  I will post them as soon as Verizon and Gmail decide to deliver them to my Inbox.

Meanwhile, here's this:

I stopped by Dewey Square, site of #OccupyBoston, across from the Boston Fed, on my way back from the Fung Wah bus on Sunday night. I gave some activists who were still up a report about what I'd seen earlier in the day at #OWS. I will have lots of news about #OB in the days, and hopefully weeks and months, to come.

(2) JPMorgan Chase and the NYPD: It's hard to believe this is for real, but there's a page on the JPMorgan Chase website making this startling announcement:

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond  Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing "profound  gratitude" for the company's donation.

"These officers put their  lives on the line every day to keep us safe," Dimon said. "We're  incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how  much we value their hard work."
(3) Cops for Labor? Notwithstanding the rough treatment of protestors by the NYPD ten days ago (reported on here), and the conflicting reports about what happened on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday night, my sense was that the cops, at least the "blue shirts" (rank and file, as opposed to the "white shirt" officers) have been pretty decent to the #OWS protesters, sometimes even sympathetic. (There were lots of protest signs aimed at garnering such sympathy, e.g. "We're Fighting for Your Pensions.)  In any case, there's been lots of discussion of the role of the cops in NYC and elsewhere in this burgeoning movement.

One of the feature articles from our Sept/Oct Annual Labor Issue is highly relevant to those discussions: Kristian Williams's Cops for Labor?: Police support for protesters in Wisconsin  was an exception to the historical rule. I just posted it to the website yesterday.  It's a compelling account of the role cops have played in labor disputes, and the evolution of police unions away from organizations that could show solidarity with other unions.

(d) Alabama Expels Immigrants: This caught my eye from today's New York Times:  in an article about how Latino immigrants in one Alabama town are fleeing because of the state's tough new anti-immigrant law, which allows police to ask for papers on routine traffic stops and requires schools to check students' immigration status, one of the law's supporters had this evidence of the law's success:

Mr. Orr said there were already signs that the law was working, pointing  out that the work-release center in Decatur, about 50 miles to the  northwest, was not so long ago unable to find jobs for inmates with  poultry processors or home manufacturers. Since the law was enacted in  June, he said, the center has been placing more and more inmates in  these jobs, now more than 150 a day.
Maybe I don't understand how people think in Alabama, but I'd say the fact that this is the best evidence he could come up with is a pretty powerful indication that the new law is not going to be an economic boon.

More soon,

--Chris Sturr