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October 26, 2011
The OWS Battle to End Crony Capitalism Was Presaged in the Battle for Brooklyn
BuzzFlash.com
by Michael Galinsky
The Battle for Brooklyn filmmaker pens a compelling essay about how the film and Occupy Wall Street are cut from the same cloth.
Six months after the project was announced, faced with the threat of eminent domain and a multi-year battle to save their homes, almost all of the condo-owners in the footprint accepted a buyout from the developer. It was later learned the buyouts had actually been paid for with public money. This left Daniel Goldstein as the only person living in his 31-unit building. The media portrayed him as a NIMBY who was standing in the way of necessary and publicly beneficial "progress." Thousands of his neighbors stood with him, and appreciated what he had done, but outside the circle of people who really knew what was going on, there was an effort to characterize him as a villain.
The larger community surrounding the project's footprint was somewhat divided about the development plan, but there was a strong base of opposition. To counter this movement, the developer went right to the corporate playbook and started to buy off community groups and purchase help from others to support the project. When the press treats reporting like theater, reality gets lost in the shuffle. In the papers and on TV, the community group actively fighting the project and supported by thousands of donations from local residents, gets the he said/ she said treatment in relation to the developer. Nearly every news story gets launched by a corporate press release, and just like Occupy Wall Street, people who don't go down to check out the situation for themselves have no idea of what's going on. One thing that has driven the OWS movement, though, is that people have gone down, and they've found a very different picture than what they've been told. The papers are telling them one thing and Facebook is telling them another. This process leads to deeper questions about the media, and what is really being delivered to the public.
Posted by eric at October 26, 2011 10:12 AM