Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street
Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing.
Capital punishment is expensive! Since California reinstated the death penalty in 1978, it’s executed 13 people and with a grand total of $4 billion in related spending, that works out to a cost of $308 million per person, reports the Los Angeles Times. The new findings come from a study by U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula Mitchell. The goal of the study was to present options on how to curb state budget costs. “The authors outline three options for voters to end the current reality of spiraling costs and infrequent executions,” reports Carol Williams, “fully preserve capital punishment with about $85 million more in funding for courts and lawyers each year; reduce the number of death penalty-eligible crimes for an annual savings of $55 million; or abolish capital punishment and save taxpayers about $1 billion every five or six years.” The Times notes that a “death penalty prosecution costs up to 20 times as much as a life-without-parole case” with the least expensive death penalty trail costing $1.1 million more than the most expensive parole case for life-without-trial.
(Source: theatlantic)
