Imagine the amount of press the following story would get if it occurred at a Tea Party event; “If you ever want to see the biggest bunch of a**holes in the world, it’s Occupy Wall Street,” an unidentified man told me. We were in the atrium of 60 Wall Street, a location that Occupy Wall Street uses for meetings especially on evenings such as this past Friday when the weather outside was rainy and cold. The gentleman speaking to me was clearly upset, in his late 30s, neatly dressed and black. He eyed the tables of white Occupiers chowing down nearby. “I brought plates,” he said. “I brought plates free for everyone to eat on and what do they do? They asked me if I’d washed my hands. That’s how they treat us here.”

This man’s complaints about his own personal experience of antiblack racism at Occupy Wall Street were echoed by every black person I spoke to this past week in New York. Some people did not want to go on record, possibly fearing reprisals from people at Occupy Wall Street, but others freely admitted in video interviews that BigGovernment.com and Breitbart.TV will be releasing this week that they think the Occupy Wall Street movement is “clearly” and “absolutely” racist against people of color based on their own personal experience.

Significantly, these complaints of racism are coming not from outside critics but from supporters and members of the Occupy movement. As this interview clip with Occupy Newark leader Eric Richardson shows, he’s an advocate for the supposed ideals of the Occupy movement but says he’s experienced racism from both the leadership and the rank-and-file members of the Occupy movement.

This personal experience of racism at Occupy Wall Street provides a sharp contrast  with the Tea Party movement that has been accused of racism — and specifically antiblack racism — constantly over the past several years. I recently did an appearance on the David Webb show on Sirius XM satellite radio and I asked Webb point blank if he’d experienced any racism personally in the Tea Party. His answer was an immediate unhesitating “no”. Webb said the racism he’s experienced due to his association with the Tea Party has consisted being called “Uncle Tom” and worse by liberals.

Later this week, we’ll be airing more clips on racism at Occupy Wall Street and also discussing exactly why this racism is occurring.

While most cities in America long ago got rid of rent control, New York remains a bastion of government-mandated limits on what landlords can charge renters. About 50 percent of New York’s rental market is affected by rent control or rent stabilization, policies that keep rents artificially low and produce housing shortages, higher overall housing costs, and all sorts of corruption.

The court case Harmon v. Kimmel may finally bring an end to rent control laws that have been on the books in one form or another since the 1940s. James D. Harmon owns a building in Manhattan where the tenants are paying rents that are about 60 percent below the going market rate. After losing various legal battles at lower levels, Harmon has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his argument that rent stabilization is a form of takings that should be prohibited under the Constitution. The Court has not yet announced whether it will hear the case but has asked the state and city of New York to respond to Harmon’s argument.

Cato’s Burrus wrote a friend of the court brief on the case and explains why rent control and rent stabilization are bad at promoting affordable housing and abridgments of economic freedom.

Shot and edited by Joshua Swain.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

Thanks Big Labor!

Now New York administrators are trying to deep-six a program created a few years ago in the collective bargaining agreement with the United Federation of Teachers: the Absent Teacher Reserve.

What’s this?  A creation of bureaucrats, politicians and labor bosses, the ATR is comprised of teachers who literally have no classroom for one reason or another. Due to a labor contract stipulation, they can’t be fired or laid off, and continue to draw the same salaries as full-time teachers. They’re put into the ATR pool, where they may be assigned to work as substitutes, clerks, or perhaps to do nothing at all.

They’re clearly not needed, and collectively they make a great deal of money. How’s that for management of taxpayer dollars?

Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools, estimated the elimination of this program would save the city an incredible $100 million a year.

According to DNAinfo.com:

“Until recently, the city allowed ATR teachers to remain at a posting for a full school term, during which the school principal could decide whether to hire them. That changed with the weekly reassignments, which went into effect in October as part of a deal with the United Federation of Teachers to avert layoffs.

“The department says this is a fairer and more efficient way for the castoffs to find new jobs. The regular reshuffling gives them more opportunities to impress more potential bosses, officials say.”

This – once again – raises the all-important question: are schools designed to meet the developmental needs of children or the employment needs of adults?  These folks did not make the cut the first time around, for one reason or another. Yet the union insists on wasting precious resources on them, and shuffling them out for repeated auditions for jobs they are probably not qualified for.  Shouldn’t we be putting the best and brightest in front of our students?  Oh, silly me.  This is the public sector.

Is there any business in the private sector that operates like this?  The car companies used to have the Job Bank – a similar program for “displaced” workers – but that was done away with because it cost millions and was highly ineffective.

The ATR is no different.  We can’t expect school tax dollars to be put to the best possible use when politicians lack the intestinal fortitude to do away with ridiculous, ineffective programs like this.

Well you may possibly be right, but the communist forces who have increasingly infiltrated the movement have a very different view.

To them “Occupy” signifies  is the beginning of the end of capitalism. “Occupy” is a sign  to Leninists the world over that we are entering revolutionary times, and nothing will ever be the same again.

The following excerpts are from opening remarks by Larry Holmes, First Secretary of the pro Cuba/North Korea Workers World Party, to the WWP national leadership meeting Dec. 17 in New York City.

We are in the opening stages of a wholly new epoch.

This epoch in all likelihood will be protracted and long. It will be uneven, it will be explosive, it will be fraught with dangers — all of it necessary to that which we have been waiting so long for: the awakening of our global proletariat, and especially the awakening of that section of the proletariat whose development we are responsible for — the working class of the U.S.

The epoch I am referring to is the beginning of the end of capitalism. The epoch will end with the destruction of capitalism and the expropriation of the capitalist class…

To Holmes, capitalism has come to end of the road. It is the responsibility of Marxist-Leninists to hasten an inevitable process through organization and international solidarity.

The important point is that anti-capitalist consciousness is growing on a global basis. It is actually surging. Some of it is incipient, not well articulated; some of it is better articulated; some of it is articulated by those who are not real revolutionaries and who have another agenda with whom we have differences. All of that will be part of the terrain that we are developing and fighting.

The Party and the revolutionary movement and all who are moving in a revolutionary direction should not underestimate the depth of the radicalization of sections of the working class, especially the youth but not only the youth. Because radicalization, especially when it abets the struggle, becomes contagious.

And so, if the Party is ultimately going to play its role in helping our class to move toward what is sometimes called the maximum program — socialist revolution — it will be necessary for us to be very conscious, very meticulous and serious in how we go about it.

There are sections of the world capitalist class that are more aware than even the most militant sections of the working-class movement of the reality that this capitalist crisis is no “garden variety” crisis; but rather something infinitely more profound than all previous crises and more importantly, a crisis from which there is no way out.

This is no small matter because our class and its organizations cannot fight that which it does not fully understand. It goes without saying that we communists must assist the working class and the oppressed in defending all the gains, be they significant or meager gains, that are under relentless attack. However, let there be no illusions — the epochal class struggle that is in the making on a global level will not be resolved on the basis of concessions or reforms, or a return to some semblance of “capitalist stability.” Those days are over.

It is important, henceforth, for us to see the possibility of socialist revolution — no not tomorrow — but neither as merely some idea that has no relevance to the class struggle today. To truly understand how unprecedented and irreversible the present world capitalist crisis is, is to understand that the question of the need for world socialist revolution is not something that can be postponed.

Whatever other work the Party undertakes in the day-to-day class struggle, we will not be of help to our class and only cause more confusion, if we fail to illuminate the road to the socialist revolution.

Holmes sees Occupy Wall Street as an a re-energization of the revolutionary movement – young people not jaded by the sordid past failures of socialism, leading the way into a new, and final revolutionary upsurge. Holmes admits that revolutionaries of his generation need to catch the new red tide, or be left behind.

OWS has sharpened the crisis for the revolutionary movement. It is a crisis for us and our friends and allies. Why? Because even though we are ideologically ahead and can teach the best elements in the Occupy movement things they need to learn about imperialism, about the national question, about the woman question and on and on — in some ways they are ahead of us….

The Occupy Wall Street movement should serve as a wake up call to all who remain committed to a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist direction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the developments that led up to it, are easier to understand today as we can more fully appreciate the devastating toll of more than 30 years of worldwide counterrevolution.

Part of that devastating toll has been the degeneration and weakening of the revolutionary socialist orientation.

Degeneration does not happen all at once, overnight, but rather incrementally, almost unconsciously, over an extended period of time and under the pressure of disappointments and frustrations, the causes for which in large part can be traced to stagnation in the working-class movement, demoralization, contraction and fragmentation in the revolutionary movement, and the seemingly endless prevalence of bourgeois triumphalism — a prevalence that has clearly now come to an end.

In some ways, the young, inexperienced and ideologically eclectic makers of the Occupy movement, precisely because they are not burdened by the baggage of past defeats, understand the gravity of the global capitalist crisis and the revolutionary potential that it has opened better than many of us seasoned veteran revolutionary Marxists.

We will not be able to help the OWS movement advance until and unless we catch up to it.

In my opinion, the spring and summer of 2012 will see a big upsurge in revolutionary movements all over the Europe and North America.

Occupy Wall Street will be a big part of that movement. The Workers World Party and the several other Marxist organizations involved will not allow it to die. They see the world on the verge of huge revolutionary change. The anarchists, and malcontents who started the movement will remain, but leadership will increasing fall into the hands of labor unions and highly organized and disciplined Marxist-Leninist elements.

The New York Post reports that UFT President Michael Mulgrew recently pitched a fit over the state’s plans to expand its standardized testing sessions for math and reading to three hours.

“It’s pretty clear right now the last thing we need is more testing,” Mulgrew said, according to the Post. “Test prep is one of the biggest dangers that our kids face in schools right now. Preparing kids to take standardized tests does not lead to real learning.”

What nonsense.

How many class sessions do teachers need to show students how to fill in bubbles on a test sheet?

How many class hours are required to help kids understand the strategies behind answering multiple choice questions?

As for those tests that require students to write a brief essay – those aren’t “test” skills, Mr. Mulgrew, those are “life” skills.

Instead of complaining about “test prep,” union teachers should just focus on teaching the curriculum that’s been assigned by their local school board. The board decides the curriculum, the teachers teach it, and the tests check to see if kids are learning it. What’s so difficult about that?

Mulgrew’s “concerns” are just a smokescreen to divert attention away from the union’s contempt for accountability. Union leaders know the more time far-left teachers spend covering the approved curriculum, the less time they’ll have to “teach” their political agenda of collectivism and anti-Americanism.

The public has figured you out, Mr. Mulgrew. The self-serving, anti-student nature of your agenda becomes quite clear to taxpayers who take a closer look.

The Occupy movement had little concern about the effect they had on other people or the costs that they racked up. If you’re going to have a revolution, after all, you need to break a few eggs — other people’s eggs, apparently. But for gosh sakes, don’t ask the Occupiers to get chilly!  In a recent spate of email correspondence, John McGloin (who we featured on Big Government weeks ago) gives the weather report and makes lemonade from lemons.

This is from the email exchange between a few Occupy insiders…

We should not be fighting nature when it is unnecessary.  It is cold outside and everything slows down in the cold.  We don’t need to hibernate, but we don’t need to pretend its [sic] September.  It is important to remember that occupation is a tactic, not the goal. Although there were definite advantages to having a centralized place on the ground, our movement doesn’t depend on centralization, and in many ways Bloomberg did us a favor.

If you’re going to overthrow the entire capitalist system, you can’t fight nature and you obviously need a decent meeting space. One great idea – hold meetings in storage locker! Luckily, the United Federation of Teachers has provided just such spot for Occupy.

USING OUR STORAGE SPACE at 50 Broadway; it’s large (needs to be checked out), open, adaptable, is near Wall St. and has ground floor access to the public. It would be much easier to find alternative storage spaces.

It’s worth going off on a slight tangent here about who the United Federation of Teachers is and what they do, aside from giving storage (and potential meeting) space to their comrades at Occupy Wall Street. The UFT Is also responsible for destroying children’s futures by making bad or useless teachers nearly impossible to fire in New York. In fact, it wasn’t until just last year that the UFT agreed to get rid of “rubber rooms,” according to the New York Times.

Under the agreement, teachers the city is trying to fire will no longer be sent to the rubber rooms, known as reassignment centers, where the teachers show up every school day, sometimes for years, doing no work and drawing full salaries. Instead, these teachers will be assigned to administrative work or nonclassroom duties in their schools while their cases are pending.

The centers have been a source of embarrassment for both the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers, as articles in newspapers and magazines detailed teachers running businesses out of the rubber rooms or dozing off for hours on end.

There were over 500 bad teachers in the rubber room program in 2010 who cost New York City $30 million dollars a year. But don’t worry about the bad teachers; the UFT took great care of them. The Times continues…

The union did not appear to sacrifice much in the deal. While the agreement speeds hearings, it does little to change the arduous process of firing teachers, particularly ineffective ones. Administrators still must spend months or even years documenting poor performance before the department can begin hearings, which will still last up to two months.

And…

Although the city has invested about $2 million in hiring more lawyers to help principals get rid of teachers, it has managed to fire only three for incompetence in the last two years. During the last two school years, 45 teachers have been fired for misconduct, like corporal punishment, sexual harassment or crimes.

And…

While the agreement may solve the thorny public relations problems for the city and the union, it does nothing to address the more costly absent teacher reserve pool, which consists of teachers who have lost their jobs because of budget cuts or when a school is shut down for poor performance, but have not been accused of incompetence or wrongdoing. Those teachers, who number about 1,100, do not have permanent classroom jobs but draw full salaries; the city spends roughly $100 million annually on the pool.

So, there’s the United Federation of Teachers — causing New York  City to waste $130 million dollars a year on teachers who aren’t doing anything to actually educate children and aiding Occupy Wall Street in their quest to raise taxes. It would also be funny if the educational lives of so many children weren’t at stake.

The email brainstorming includes other references to the unions, such as the idea that union dues of people who work should pay for rental space for people who talk endlessly and plan civil disobedience…

**Finding a RENTAL SPACE TO BE FINANCED BY DONATIONS FROM UNIONS  ETC.****

The emails also give some insight on the people who make up Occupy. They aren’t just mad at capitalism; they seem to get testy with each other, as well. In the emails, Jon Good says about General Assembly meetings:

I would love to work on strategies to avoid the tension and animosity that resulted from so many angry, frustrated people being crammed into a small space and surrounded by cops, and had folks saying “fuck you, I live here, the GA consensus can’t make me do X.” (or what seemed like the pervasive attitude of crusty white males that there was a secret cabal who controlled the GA so it didn’t really represent Occupy)

Jon Good is clearly upset that the “crusty white males” are saying “you can’t make me” do something! That’s an interesting attitude for Mr. Good to take, since he appears to have added the following sentence to the General Assembly’s declaration writing process…

We will no longer tolerate living by their rules.

It’s a group of people who don’t want to live by rules, and they are shocked to find that some of them don’t want to live by rules. This is what happens when anarchists organize… and other people foot the bill.

NEW YORK (AP) – Federal authorities declined to pursue a case against an “al-Qaida sympathizer” accused of wanting to bomb police stations and post offices in New York City because they believed he was mentally unstable and incapable of pulling off the alleged plot, two law enforcement officials said Monday.

New York Police Department investigators sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as their undercover investigation of Jose Pimentel unfolded, the officials said. Both times, the FBI concluded that he wasn’t a serious threat, they said.

The FBI concluded that 27-year-old Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own,” one of the officials said.

The officials were not authorized to speak about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI’s New York office declined to comment on Monday. New York City authorities said that the FBI was involved in the case, but did not specifically say they declined to pursue the charges.

“We just believed that we couldn’t let it go any further. We had to act,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.New York authorities said Pimentel was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Authorities said police had to move quickly to arrest Pimentel on Saturday—because he was approximately one hour from being able to detonate explosives.

“He was in fact putting this bomb together,” Kelly said. “He was drilling holes and it would have been not appropriate for us to let him walk out the door with that bomb.”

The suspect was being held after his arraignment on numerous terrorism-related charges. His lawyer Joseph Zablocki said his client’s behavior leading up to the arrest was not that of a conspirator trying to conceal some violent scheme. Zablocki said Pimentel was public about his activities and was not trying to hide anything.

“I don’t believe that this case is nearly as strong as the people believe,” Zablocki said. “He (Pimentel) has this very public online profile. … This is not the way you go about committing a terrorist attack.”

Authorities characterized him in a different way. The unemployed U.S. citizen was born in the Dominican Republic and later converted to Islam. They said he was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida’s U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

“He decided to build the bomb August of this year, but clearly he jacked up his speed after the elimination of al-Awlaki,” Kelly said.

He plotted to bomb police patrol cars and postal facilities, targeted soldiers returning home from abroad, and also talked of bombing a police station in Bayonne, N.J., authorizes said.

New York police had him under surveillance for at least a year and were working with a confidential informant; no injury to anyone or damage to property is suspected, Kelly said. In addition, authorities have no evidence that Pimentel was working with anyone else.

“He appears to be a total lone wolf,” the mayor said. “He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad.”

Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, was denied bail. The bearded, bespectacled man wore a black T-shirt and black drawstring pants and smiled at times during the proceeding. His mother and brother attended the arraignment, his lawyer said.

Pimentel was accused of having an explosive device Saturday when he was arrested, one he planned to use against others and property to terrorize the public. The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least to October 2010, and include first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act.

Kelly said a confidential informant had numerous conversations with Pimentel on Sept. 7 in which he expressed interest in building small bombs and targeting banks, government and police buildings.

Pimentel also posted on his website trueislam1.com and on blogs his support of al-Qaida and belief in jihad, and promoted an online magazine article that described in detail how to make a bomb, Kelly said.

Among his Internet postings, the commissioner said, was an article that states: “People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare.”

The New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division was involved in the arrest. Kelly said Pimentel spent most of his years in Manhattan and lived about five years in Schenectady. He said police in the Albany area tipped New York City police off to Pimentel’s activities.

New York City remains a prime terrorist target a decade after the Sept. 11 attack. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there have been at least 14 foiled plots against the city, including the latest suspected scheme. The most serious threats came from Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010 and is now serving a life sentence, and Najibullah Zazi, who targeted the subway system a year earlier. Zazi pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges and is awaiting sentencing.

Asked why federal authorities were not involved in the case, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said there was communication with them but his office felt that given the timeline “it was appropriate to proceed under state charges.”

In another state terrorism prosecution, two men were arrested in May after they allegedly told an undercover detective about their desire to attack synagogues.

A grand jury declined to indict Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh on the most serious charge initially brought against them—a high-level terror conspiracy count that carried the potential for life in prison without parole. They were, however, indicted on lesser state terror and hate crime charges, including one punishable by up to 32 years behind bars.

Attorneys for Ferhani said hate crime charges and a rarely used state terrorism law were misapplied to what they have called a case of police entrapment.

Alexis Smith, 22, who lives in an apartment in the same building as Pimentel, said she was shocked that he was a suspect in a terrorist plot. “He was always very courteous to us,” she said, adding that Pimentel helped her carry groceries and luggage into the building.

“It’s nice to know he was only working alone,” she said.