Hey, #OWS...

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... Occupy Jay-Z?

From Mediaite:

Right now there is a slightly heated debate going on in the Abrams Media office as we’ve found a story that somehow intersects the purviews of three of our different sites; Jay-Z’s company, Rocawear, is now selling a t-shirt that says “Occupy Wall Street” with graffiti style lettering modifying the message to read “Occupy All Streets.” A mini scandal has brewed over the shirt as it’s become clear that Rocawear, currently, has no plans to give any of the procedes to the occupiers themselves.

Please feel free to substitute "profits" for "procedes" just to make everything perfectly clear as we don't think Jay-Z is going to take a bath on these t-shirts for #OWS.

Predictably, this prompted much debate and navel-gazing at Meidaite.

Is this a brave show of support or a cynical commodification of a genuine cultural movement? Here’s a Mediaite take.

You can read thier take at the link if you desire but frankly it's entirely irrelevant. To our knowledge, Jay-Z is not in violation of any copyright laws and beyond that, he owes absolutely nothing to the #OWS crowd or anyone else for that matter.

Just another lesson in capitalism and just the way things work in the real world for the #OWS set.

From the comments:

Why don't they make their own t-shirts? All they need is a loom, and then they could weave together the back hair from all the aging hippies in Zuccotti park...

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We had the day off yesterday, so we decided to wander on down to the Civic Center to see what was shaking at the Occupy San Diego site.

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This guy appeared to be one of the leaders of Occupy San Diego. We asked first before taking his picture and he politely obliged.

There was a pretty significant police presence and as we did not interact with any of the Occupiers it was not clear to us if the police were rousting them at sundown to prevent any sleep-overs.

We spent about 20 minutes just hanging out and taking in the vibe of the scene. Outside of some of the signage and sloganeering we were left with the impression that Occupy San Diego was nothing more than a filthy homeless encampment.




* You're crazy if you think we're rolling out a picture of Jay-Z without his lovely wife, Beyonce.