Nick Kristof visits with a banker who says his professional class is mostly responsible for the home mortgage debacle. Excerpt:

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”

Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

Kristof said the Federal Reserve bailout of banks is not a scandal; the Fed is the lender of last resort, and its action no doubt saved the US financial system from collapse. But:

Yet what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.

Follow the money from Wall Street to Washington. See, this kind of thing is why, when I make my move this month, I’m registering to vote as an Independent, and leaving the Republican Party. I have very, very little faith that the Democrats will do anything serious about this kind of thing. But I have 100 percent certainty that the Republicans won’t, that they will defend and defend and defend bankers and the priorities of the very rich until the bitter end. Why, just this week:

Republicans in the U.S. Senate want to cover the cost of extending a payroll tax cut by freezing federal workers’ pay through 2015 and reducing the federal civilian workforce by 10 percent, putting them at odds with Democrats over how to pay for the $119.6 billion tax break.

The proposal counters efforts by President Barack Obama and Democrats to expand the payroll tax cut and pay for it by imposing a 3.25 percent surtax on income above $1 million.

Because it’s better to cut the pay (given inflation) of middle-class government employees, and add more of them to unemployment rolls, than to ask millionaires to pay more tax. Hey, they tend to vote Democrat anyway, so who cares, right? I see. Got it. But seriously, this is the kind of conservatism middle and working class Americans are supposed to support? More Wall Street, less Main Street?

It’s 1932 for Egypt’s Christians (and liberals), given that Islamists have wiped out the liberal parties in Egypt’s first round of elections.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

More:

“It means that, if the Brotherhood chooses, Parliament can be an Islamists affair — a debate between liberal Islamists, moderate Islamists and conservatives Islamists, and that is it,” Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egyptian-born researcher at the Century Foundation in Cairo, said this week.

The ultraconservative Salafi parties, meanwhile, will be able to use their electoral clout to make their own demands for influence on appointments in the new government. Mr. Hanna added: “I don’t mind saying this is not a great thing. It is not a joyous day on my end.”

No one should be surprised by this, though I’m sure many Westerners who were all goo-goo over the Tahrir Square revolution will be genuinely shocked to discover that a majority of Egyptians actually don’t want to live according to Western ideas of liberty, but actually prefer to live in a theocracy. I only hope that Washington has the good sense and the human decency to liberalize immigration from Egypt so the Copts and Egyptian liberals can get out and come to the US before the pogroms start — especially when the country runs out of food and the funds to pay for it.

David Brooks asked his elderly  (70 years and older) readers to write him to share lessons they’ve learned from their lives. He’s written two columns about it (here and here). They’re fascinating, especially the second one. For example:

Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it. A man named Neil lamented that he had been “an Eeyore not a Tigger; a pessimist, not an optimist; an aimless grasshopper, not a purposeful ant; a dreamer, not a doer; a nomad, not a settler; a voyager, not an adventurer; a spectator, not an actor, player or participant.” He concluded: “Neil never amounted to anything.”

The happier ones divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases. They wrote things like: There were six crucial decisions in my life. Then they organized their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They had more control over their fate.

I had never thought of it that way, but there seems to be something intuitively right about this. I think that the “chapterizing” of one’s life is part of a more general approach to living your life as if there were a narrative spine to it. I have always believed, without knowing quite why, that I have a divinely ordered path through life, and that the path is more to be discovered than made. Of course the act of discovering this path is also an act of making the path, because even if God has an ideal for us, He also gives us free will. The point, though, is that I have always assumed that there is a purpose to my life, and part of my task is to discover that purpose and live by it.

When my sister was told that she had Stage IV cancer, she fell back on her bedrock conviction that God had a purpose in giving her that cross. She never wasted any time trying to figure out why this terrible fate had befallen her. She deeply believed that this would be a pointless exercise in self-pity, and one that couldn’t possibly lead to a satisfactory answer. All it could do is to sap her will to live, and to heal, if that was God’s will. Better to accept it, she believed, and to live as joyfully as she could for as long as she could. Ruthie couldn’t have done any of this if she didn’t believe that her life, and everyone’s life, was not sound and fury, signifying nothing, but was shot through with purpose and meaning, however dimly perceptible.

More from Brooks’s most recent column:

Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them. For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.

Isn’t that something! Our popular culture valorizes the Rebel, yet failed rebels are the most miserable people. It’s surely not the case that mere conformists are happy heroes. It must be true, then, that the happiest and most accomplished people find a way to live out their own narrative, and to find fulfillment, within the natural limits of our lives and circumstances. This doesn’t necessary make for the most exciting television. But it makes for a good life.

Shopping for my geek kid on the BoingBoing Gift List was a bad idea, because I found so many things I would love to have. I wish Santa would bring me this memento mori watch.  (Warning: do not go to the Watchismo site unless you want to lose yourself in horological lust.) You know what else would be great to have, if you were me? This little bitty coffee maker.  And boy oh boy, Santa, does Your Working Boy ever want to have this Saddleback leather satchel, to carry his laptop and his books and his papers.

Ah, but that satchel is $300 or thereabouts. Don’t have that kind of money to spend on Self this year, but I love Saddleback’s guide for how to convince your sweetie to fork out that kind of money for a high-quality leather product:

Her to Him 

• You know, I feel frisky just thinking about that leather piece.
• I would just feel so sexy carrying this on my body.
• I don’t think I’d need to go shopping for another thing all year after buying something like this.

Him to Her

• Looking at this case just makes me want to HOLD you.
• I don’t know why, but owning a hope and a dream like this, makes me want to just sit down on the couch and OPEN UP about the hopes and dreams we share.
• Think of all of the extra TIME we’d spend TOGETHER on our long walks holding hands and showing off the leather.

Sadly, Mrs. Working Boy is immune to my oleaginous blandishments, at least this year, with all these moving expenses upon us. Feh. But in all seriousness, let me put in a good word for spending more money for something high quality and enduring. The other day I was finishing up a cooking job, using my Shun Ken Onion knives that she bought me from Williams-Sonoma two Christmases ago. She spent $300 on three knives — a chef’s knife, a serrated knife, and a paring knife — and it just about killed her to spend that kind of money on a single present (it was all I got that year). (Nota bene: the same exact set is now about $400 this year). I remember opening it that morning, and tearing up at the thoughtfulness of that present. Those knives have not only been deeply practical and useful, they have also been an unbelievable pleasure to use. I told her the other night that I wish she could take these knives back and give them to me all over again, that’s how much I love them. I will use and treasure them till the day I die, and I’m not even kidding. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on gifts that don’t mean a lot, but if you can find just the right thing for your sweetie, even if it costs more than you really want to pay, consider that value is not the same thing as cost.

You ever spent a (relatively) crazy amount on an object, for yourself or someone else, and it turned out to have been a really wise purchase, or investment? What was it? What made it such a worthwhile expenditure?

Though I love “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy (books and films), I’m not a fantasy reader. Still, I very much enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s essay about J.R.R. Tolkien and the meaning of fantasy books for the young. Excerpt:

Something similar is going on with the Eragon books. Adolescent boys, of the kind who take up books in the first place these days, already experience their lives as a series of ordeals: tests, in every sense. A narrative whose purpose is not to push the hero or heroine toward a moment of moral crisis, à la “Huckleberry Finn” or “Little Women,” but to put him through a telescoped series of ordeals, which aim only at preparing him for the next series of ordeals: this is the story of their life. Eragon never really grows from boy to man, as he might have in another kind of book; he mostly just learns how to be a dragon rider and contend with mysterious helpers, half hostile and half friendly, as kids do at school. Kids go to fantasy not for escape but for organization, and a little elevation; since life is like this already, they imagine that it might be still like this but more magical. By the time they’re ready for college-admissions letters, they’re already dragon riders, if not yet grownups.

One might mock—one does mock—the mastery of what is, after all, mere mock history. But the fantasy readers’ learned habit of thinking historically is an acquisition as profound in its way as the old novelistic training in thinking about life as a series of moral lessons. Becoming an adult means learning a huge body of lore as much as it means learning to know right from wrong. We mostly learn that lore in the form of conventions: how you hold the knife, where you put it, that John was the witty Beatle, Paul the winning one, that the North once fought the South. Learning in symbolic form that the past can be mastered is as important as learning in dramatic form that your choices resonate; being brought up to speed is as important as being brought up to grade. Fantasy fiction tells you that history is available, that the past counts. As the boring old professor knew, the backstory is the biggest one of all. That’s why he was scribbling old words on the blackboard, if only for his eyes alone.

Read the whole thing. The Tolkien material appears toward the beginning. I would be grateful to readers of this blog who are fans of the fantasy genre if they would offer their reactions in the comments thread.

UPDATE: Alan Jacobs says Gopnik gets Tolkien wrong. Excerpt:

It has just become the tale that middle-to-highbrow critics tell — ever since Edmund Wilson was saying his own manifestly untrue things about Tolkien in the New Yorker fifty years ago — that Tolkien’s fictional world is morally simplistic and rigidly Manichaean. It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that’s primarily because Tolkien wasn’t especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren’t sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.

In a discussion about colonialism, Brad DeLong asserts that “his” civilization consists of the moral heroes of the West, not the figures we see as villains today. Conquistadores and slave traders bad, missionaries and educators and humanitarians good. Ross Douthat — back blogging again after his long respite at Canyon Ranch getting a month-long massage, or something — is not having it. Excerpts:

How many Europeans improved conditions for future generations even as they cooperated in present-day injustices? How often were “science, industry, technology, and public health” carried on the same trains and ships that brought the lash and the maxim gun? The kind of historical surgery that DeLong wants to perform, in which the bad guys (and anyone who identifies with them in any way) get one corner and the good guys get another, is intuitively appealing, but I don’t think it’s plausible. If we want to claim to share a civilizational identity with Las Casas, then we have to admit that we share some sort of civilizational identity with Cortes as well.

And then the knife, politely inserted:

Brad DeLong holds a faculty position at a state university that owes its very existence to an American war of aggression against Mexico, in a country whose founding documents were written by slaveowners, on a continent that was ruthlessly expropriated from its indigenous population. Is he really sure that he can so cleanly separate himself from the various plunderers, exploiters, slavers and imperialists who have shaped the history of the Western world?

This is an excellent, excellent point, and one every one of us has to face about our own history, and ourselves. We can no more claim that we are free of a connection between the evil that our ancestors have done, and that our civilization or society does than we can claim we ourselves are free from sin. And to complicate matters even further, there are plenty of cases in which, over time, good comes out of evil, and vice versa. In 1995, Keith B. Richburg, reflecting on the end of his tour of duty covering Africa for the Washington Post, confronted the awful ways his personal identity is tied up in the history of slavery. Read this stunning passage. It’s one of the most morally searing things, and ruthlessly honest things, I’ve ever read.

I watched the dead float down a river in Tanzania.

Of all the gut-wrenching emotions I wrestled with during three years of covering famine, war and misery around Africa, no feeling so gripped me as the one I felt that scorching hot day last April, standing on the Rusumo Falls bridge, in a remote corner of Tanzania, watching dozens of discolored, bloated bodies floating downstream, floating from the insanity that was Rwanda.

The image of those bodies in the river lingered in my mind long after that, recurring during interminable nights in desolate hotel rooms without running water, or while I walked through the teeming refugee camps of eastern Zaire. And the same feeling kept coming back too, as much as I tried to force it from my mind. How can I describe it? Revulsion? Yes, but that doesn’t begin to touch on what I really felt. Sorrow, or pity, at the monumental waste of human life? Yes, that’s closer. But the feeling nagging at me was — is — something more, something far deeper. It’s a sentiment that, when uttered aloud, might come across as callous, self-obsessed, maybe even racist.

But I’ve felt it before, that same nagging, terrible sensation. I felt it in Somalia, walking among the living dead of Baidoa and Baardheere — towns in the middle of a devastating famine. And I felt it again in those refugee camps in Zaire, as I watched bulldozers scoop up black corpses, and trucks dump them into open pits.

I know exactly the feeling that haunts me, but I’ve just been too embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I can: There but for the grace of God go I.

Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I’ll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn’t been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist — a mere spectator — watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them — or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.

Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I’ve become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I’ve seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I’ve interviewed evil “warlords,” I’ve encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I’ve talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I’ve seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I’ve seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.

I’ve also seen heroism, honor and dignity in Africa, particularly in the stories of small people, anonymous people — Africans battling insurmountable odds to publish an independent newspaper, to organize a political party, usually just to survive. I interviewed an opposition leader in the back seat of a car driving around the darkened streets of Blantyre, in Malawi, because it was then too dangerous for us even to park, lest we be spotted by the ubiquitous security forces. In Zaire, I talked to an opposition leader whose son had just been doused with gasoline and burned to death, a message from dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s henchmen. And in the Rift Valley of central Kenya, I met the Rev. Festus Okonyene, an elderly African priest with the Dutch Reformed Church who endured terrible racism under the Afrikaner settlers there, and who taught me something about the meaning of tolerance, forgiveness, dignity and restraint.

But even with all the good I’ve found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world’s worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I’ve had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.

Now, after three years, I’m beaten down and tired. And I’m no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa’s pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out — because, now, I am not one of them.

Somewhere in the US, perhaps, there is a white man the same age as Keith Richburg, and whose own ancestor was the slave trader who captured Richburg’s African ancestor, put him in shackles, stole him to America and sold him as property. And because that man committed that act of villainy centuries ago, Keith Richburg lives in freedom. Perhaps. History is so damn complicated. What is not complicated is that we own it. All of it. Even the parts that disgust us. Even as things we do today that strike us as morally good, or at least morally neutral, will disgust our descendants, who will wonder how on earth we participated in those things, and who will wish to disclaim us — something they can only do by lying to themselves.

Sorry for no posting today. I was out all day on business. Before I dive back into the Really Serious Stuff, I’d like to have a word with you about beans.

Yes, friends, beans. Nature’s little scrubbrushes! Food prices are going up. If you’re not the one in your house who does the grocery shopping, you may not realize this. Both of us shop, and boy, is it noticeable, especially on the bread aisle. When we’ve talked about food and healthy eating in this space before, some of you have said that the poor and the otherwise cash-strapped cannot afford to eat healthy. That’s true if by “eat healthy” you mean “shop at Whole Foods.” And it’s possibly true if by “eat healthy” you mean “buy only fresh fruits and vegetables.” It’s not true if by “eat healthy” you mean “eat exactly what fits my narrow range of taste.” But it’s not altogether true.

Sharon Astyk has some practical suggestions for how you can eat healthy for less money. Excerpt:

So what do you eat when you are poor? Well, your friends are going to be beans, lentils and grains. They are nutritious, tasty, simple, accessible and store well. If there’s any way you can come up with the money, buy them in big bags in bulk – a minimum of 10lbs, 50 is better – much cheaper per pound.

Whole grains and dried beans store nearly forever (brown rice is an exception here – it isn’t a whole grain, and it goes rancid quickly – white stores better, but is less nutritious). You say you can’t use 50lbs of beans? I bet you can – over 5 years. They will still be good, just need a bit longer to cook. You have to think ahead a bit here – remember, you’ll need to soak the beans or throw them in the slow or pressure cooker or on the back of the stove the night before.

The obvious thing is beans and rice. Sweat an onion on the stove in a little oil, throw in a carrot if you’ve got one, some garlic. Add spices – cumin, coriander, bay and dried chilies are good, but is almost any combination. Add the beans and a little liquid – water, broth, flat beer if you’ve got it lying around. Cook any kind of beans for a short while, until you like the way they taste, add a little salt and eat them over rice.

There’s a lot more in Sharon’s post — and because she’s raising her family on a professor’s salary, she knows well how to stretch a dollar. I think she’s right on target with this bean suggestion. I’m amazed by how many people I know who turn their nose up at beans. I like beans fine, but being on the Orthodox Lenten fast meant that I had to learn how to be creative in cooking them, because I was eating them a lot. I’m convinced that people who think they dislike beans have simply never had them prepared well. You’d be amazed by how delicious various beans can be when cooked with onions, garlic, and the right spices. And you can vary the spices a lot. I bought three dollars worth of dried favas in bulk at Whole Foods last week, spiced them well, and have had at least six meals with them — either over rice, or plain. I have enough cooked favas in the fridge for three or four more meals. And they’re really good, too. As Sharon points out, if you go visit an Indian grocery store, you’ll find all kinds of great spice options for beans. Plus, beans  and legumes don’t all taste the same, so if you’ve decided you don’t like beans, it could be that you don’t understand how wide the variety is. Those orange lentils, for example, don’t have a strong taste at all, and tend to express well whatever spices you cook them in. Favas and kidney beans are stronger-tasting.

Would I rather have steak or chicken instead of all these beans all the time? Sure. But that’s not possible now, for religious reasons. Because religious restrictions compelled me a few years back to get smart and creative about cooking beans, I now find that I eat less meat in normal time, and more beans, which are rich in protein and fiber. And cheap!

Sharon also recommends oatmeal. As I’ve pointed out here before, buying steel-cut oats out of the bulk bin is really cheap, and makes for a filling breakfast. Don’t ever buy “Irish oatmeal” in the picturesque can. It’s way, way more expensive than the same thing from the bulk bin. If you’ve decided you don’t like oatmeal, give the steel-cut variety a try. It’s simply normal oatmeal that hasn’t been pressed. It takes longer to cook, but the flavor is so much nuttier and more delicious.

The mother of all bailouts just happened.  A group of the world’s central banks joined the collective action, led by the Federal Reserve, but as the NYT report makes clear, this is all about America bailing out the rest of them:

The other central banks said they had also agreed to make similar loans of their own currencies as necessary, but they noted that the only extraordinary demand at present was for dollars.

Michael Brendan Dougherty tweets:

So I guess the Fed has a triple mandate now: 1) Low inflation. 2) Low unemployment. 3) saving Greek pensions.

Zero Hedge:

This means that the global situation is far, far more dire than the talking heads have said. Luckily, when this step fails, which it will, Mars can always come and bail us out.

FT Alphaville:

…RBC’s Michael Cloherty, who makes the astute observation that it is now cheaper for foreign banks to borrow dollars from their central bank than it is for a US bank to borrow from the Federal Reserve.

More reax later…

UPDATE: From the Telegraph’s live blog of the situation:

Cutting swap costs is the equivalent of interest rate cuts. These banks are now basically providing unlimited US dollars to banks with which to fund themselves. The banks will be hoping this is a turning point in the crisis.

We do not know what caused this decision, we may never know, but the smart money is on the fact that yields on one-year German debt went negative this morning (paying Germany to lend it money).

In news of the One Percent from my town today, the aged Cardinal Bevilacqua was allowed to give criminal trial testimony from the comfort of his own home this week. This special arrangement has ticked off an Inquirer columnist:

Behind closed doors at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary on the Main Line, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua was deposed and cross-examined on video in the privacy of his own home. Since when are criminal witnesses given such deference?

A handful of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and defendants attended the two-day legal proceeding. At least I think they did. No one associated with the child-rape and cover-up case can discuss it without risking being held in contempt.

The gag order rivals the church’s chilling culture of secrecy. Yesterday, the judge even refused to confirm that the hearing had ended.

Bevilacqua, 88, has not been charged with a crime, but the man who presided over the archdiocese for 15 years remains a key witness in the case against Msgr. William Lynn, his secretary for clergy. Lynn was charged with conspiracy and child endangerment for transferring accused predators to parishes where they could abuse again.

There’s arguably a good reason for this special arrangement. Bevilacqua is 88 years old, and, it is claimed, suffers from dementia, though he was found by the judge to be competent to testify. The trial doesn’t start until March, but given his advanced age and condition, prosecutors didn’t want to risk him not being available to testify then. Still, there is significant skepticism locally about this guy and his legal strategy. A few years ago, when giving grand jury testimony, Fast Tony couldn’t recall much of anything about his years running the archdiocese. And I am told that the cardinal’s condition has not prevented him from making appearances at Catholic events of late. Let us give thanks, I guess, for the miracle of situational lucidity. Ahem.

Meanwhile, in other tales of local privilege, Arlene Ackerman, the not-exactly-competent former Philly schools superintendent — the highest paid public official in the city at the time — has filed for unemployment after being forced out of her job. Well, sure, you say, she’s now jobless. Ah, but the school board got rid of her by buying out her contract a few months ago for nearly $1 million. Yet this woman has the nerve to apply for taxpayer-provided unemployment benefits! Hey, Occupy Philadelphia, why don’t you go occupy Arlene Ackerman?

It’s not like OP has anything else to do, given that police today broke up the small Occupy Philly encampment, two days after the final deadline for its dispersal had passed. I can’t say I feel a bit sorry for them. This thing has cost the city nearly $650,000 since it began, and it was impossible to see what they could accomplish at this point by continuing to squat on public property. Plus:

As the weeks went on, scores of homeless people, drawn in part by the regular hot meals that Occupy provided, moved into the encampment. At its peak, city officials estimated there were 230 tents. Over the last few weeks, [initially supportive Mayor Michael] Nutter began losing patience with the protesters as problems mounted at the site, including public urination, other unsanitary conditions and one reported sexual assault.