David "Debt" Graeber evicted, claims revenge-harassment for OWS participation

>What makes me skeptical is that there's no obvious motive for this. Imagine if you're one of those people that happens to be super rich enough to be part of the 1%. The OWS people probably just seem like ants to you. You might not take kindly to them, but you probably have other things to do with your time

That's very hypothetical. In actual life, in modern history, people have been targeted for participating in such actions (and even for far less).

And it's not like the 1% is involved itself, or even knows about it directly.

The role of the police and various state agencies, as they perceive it (and as their budget and higher policy orders allow them to continue to foster that perception) is to stomp people like those, to "maintain order". They are "un-american", "troublemakers", etc.

If you'd like to learn more context, he wrote _The Democracy Project_. (He's fine with people downloading it.) There's also a wealth of videos of free talks he gave. For instance, you might reconsider your premise that Occupy "failed" — where did you learn that, and why do you believe it?

Incidentally, Aaron Swartz recommended Chomsky's _Understanding Power_, which provides some general context. (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany)

From his twitter it looks like it's a coop.

https://twitter.com/davidgraeber

It says he wasn't on the original occupancy as he wasn't born when the paperwork was originally handled but was one when the building was finished and moved in. He claims when he tried to get on it in the past via his mother the coop stalled until she was dead.

Yeah, I don't get it.

Is this some sort of rent-control problem? Where his parents lived in a rent-controlled apartment and passed it down to him improperly? (I have no idea how rent-control buildings in NYC work, this is the only that makes any sense without details)

Perhaps he grows marijuana out of his house, and the police tipped off his landlord. That could break the lease without missing a payment.

Well, it's not like the police and the state don't do "revenge harassment" for tons of people, from journalists and activists to artists, and hasn't done that historically far before McCarthy and Hoover.

From "This Lennon guy speaks against Vietnam war, let's revoke his visa", to "talk to his boss and create commotion to get this guy fired, he's a commie", to "he refused to cooperate with the TSA, let's show him who's the boss here", to far worse.

But if you start with the assumption that such things don't happen or only happened "in the past" (perhaps because of a few bad apples), everything sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. Mainly this stems from a lack of historical knowledge and perspective, so people cannot estimate correctly how possible (and frequent) those kind of events have been (and how little concrete proof is usually available, until decades later, when those things get declassified or a leak happens). They try to comprehend them armed with mass media news reports and school level history knowledge.

If it is true as alleged, this sort of article does a disservice to him and what he's working for (to me). I look at something like this and see someone who has messed up and is blaming someone else. There is a "technicality" involved but it can't be mentioned apparently. A technicality would normally be something very specific that would be easy to mention, I would think.

On the other hand, I'm sure a bunch of hysterical people will be linking this on facebook as proof that the man is out to get them.