C.S. Muncy

On Saturday, hundreds gathered in Zuccotti Park, roughly three miles from the Turkish consulate, to demonstrate their solidarity with the thousands of Turks protesting Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's regime. Photographer C.S. Muncy was on the scene to capture the action--check out his photos after the jump.

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"Starving artists" may be an affectionate term for the city's legions of struggling creatives, but it belies a more disturbing trend. Art market prices have shot up faster than the GDP, and the globalization of the marketplace prompted NPR's Adam Davidson to conclude last year that the "art market, in other words, is a proxy for the fate of the superrich themselves."

Meanwhile, MFAs have become both increasingly expensive and necessary for any career in the arts, says Tal Beery, one of the organizers behind Debtfair, a radical remodeling of the art market taking over the city this summer. Nationally, student debt has topped $1 trillion, and defaults have increased 36 percent in 2012 alone. "The debt that artists have to accrue in order to start playing the game, the barrier for entry, is much greater," Beery said.

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Apparently non-violent demonstration against corrupt banking is subject to more criminal scrutiny than actual corrupt banking.

Documents released by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund Saturday show that the FBI identified Occupy Wall Street as a "potential criminal and terrorist" threat as early as a month before the OWS movement burst on the international scene with its initial occupation of Zuccotti Park in September 2011.

"These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of PCJF, said in a release . "These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The release of the documents comes a few weeks after federal and state authorities, including the Department of Justice and the New York East District Attorney's Office, announced a $1.9 billion settlement agreements with British-based bank, HSBC, for allowing major drug cartels and entities with economic sanctions and terrorist ties to launder money through the bank.

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We are in the midst of a "week of action", a term dubbed by a collective of housing activists--you know, those singing protestors we've written about for the past few months--and homeowners facing foreclosure, and it has been action-packed indeed.

On Monday, about 40 people from diverse backgrounds, made up of members from activist groups such as Occupied Wall Street and Organizing For Occupation, faith groups like Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and Occupy Faith, and righteous students from Columbia and New School, turned up at the Bronx Supreme Court and, like all previous singing protest actions, serenaded court officials, investors, and court guards with lyrics such as "Y'all are speculating off people's pain. With all due respect, you should be ashamed."

Fourteen of them were arrested.

The group will do this again tomorrow and Friday, respectively at Brooklyn and Queen's Supreme Court.

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NYPD

The man in the dark clothes on the right is an alleged occupier. That brown stuff covering the floor is feces and urine.

​When we contacted Occupy Wall Street yesterday to ask about allegations that the group is responsible for dumping two giant buckets of feces and urine at two lower Manhattan locations, we thought we'd get some sort of spirited response either denying or embracing the allegations.

We were wrong -- rather than deny that the alleged dumper, 25-year-old Jordan Brooks Amos, has any formal involvement with the Occupy movement, or admit that he's an occupier and condemn his alleged behavior, or even to simply own it and defend the dumpings as a form of protest, the group decided to punt.

"It appears that individuals may have taken it upon themselves to express their outrage autonomously from any decision making body within OWS," an OWS spokesman tells the Voice. "For further comment, you should contact them directly - whoever they are."

(Sigh).

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​A Philadelphia man was arrested on Friday after police say he dumped buckets of feces and urine at two separate downtown locations -- the stairs of an open-air plaza, and inside an ATM vestibule.

The good news is we've got video of each dumping, which you can see after the jump.

The NYPD is crediting the dumpings to members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who -- as you may have heard -- have been protesting in lower Manhattan since September.

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www.charlierose.com

Andrew Cuomo's BFF, Fred Dicker.

​Fred Dicker, New York Post state capitol bureau chief/Governor Andrew Cuomo's number one fan, has again irked the "occupiers" up in Albany, where activists gathered at the state capitol this morning to protest Dicker, Cuomo and News Corps., the parent company of the Post.

Calling him the "mouthpiece for Governor One Percent (Cuomo)," the occupiers stormed the capitol about 9:30 a.m. to bash Dicker and his amigo in New York's executive branch.

"There is no love lost between Dicker and the Occupy movement," Colin Donnaruma, a spokesman for the Occupy Albany movement, tells the Voice.

In a handout distributed at this morning's demonstration, the occupiers say that "while ostensibly a journalist, Dicker has raised eyebrows over the past year for his constant, breathless praise of Cuomo, even as the Governor has broken repeated promises to clean up Albany while pushing an agenda against the interests of working families in the state." 

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C.S. Muncy

Occupy Wall Street protests on Saturday at Zuccotti Park.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg has a solution for the tense police-protester relationship at Occupy Wall Street: barricades.

At a press conference this morning, the mayor, responding to reporters' repeated questions about the arrests of more than 70 occupiers over the weekend, said that the New York Police Department was simply controlling a rowdy crowd, legally using barricades to stop them from camping out in Zuccotti Park, and protecting the protesters' rights to demonstrate.

"Just trying to cause chaos doesn't do anything to advance anybody's cause. It doesn't make society better," Bloomberg told reporters. "If you have something really to say that would be a great contribution, nobody can hear you when everybody's yelling and screaming and pushing and shoving. But it makes great theater."

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At about 6 p.m. American Justice -- a blonde, vapid socialite as performed by Kanene Holder -- will be having her coming out as a debutante at the Astor Place Cube. American Justice's appearance will kick off a series of performances around the world constituting "Low Lives: Occupy!" airing on a livestream until 10 p.m. this evening. Low Lives, Holder -- also a spokesperson -- explained before rushing off to prepare for her performance, is a four-year-old international festival that features "provocative, live, political art." But for this event, they are trying something new. "This time [Low Lives] wanted to theme it specifically based on people in the Occupy movement," Holder said.

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