NY Times: "Wall Street Protesters Speak" (with video)

The Occupy Wall Street demonstration entered its 14th day on Friday. Most of the demonstrators are in their teens or 20s. Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times.

N. R. Kleinfield and Cara Buckley (NY Times) with video, (02:36):

The hodgepodge Lower Manhattan encampment known as Occupy Wall Street has no appointed leaders, no expiration date for its rabble-rousing stay and still-evolving goals and demands. Yet its two weeks of noisy occupation has lured a sturdily faithful and fervent constituency willing to express discontentment with what they feel is an inequitable financial system until, well, whenever. MORE...

Howie P.S.: The "Grey Lady" is true to form with its tardiness as well as a condescending tone. The Tea Party actions were given more credibility.

NY Times Editorial: "Banks and WikiLeaks"

NY Times (editorial):

The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.
(SNIP)
Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks. MORE...