Anti-Wall Street protests escalated with more than 700 arrests
over the weekend, thrusting the once- dwindling demonstrations into
the national spotlight.
The rallies, which began 16 days ago with a goal of occupying
Wall Street for months, spread to cities including Los
Angeles and Boston, where 25 people
were arrested Sept. 30 after police said they refused to leave the
lobby of a Bank of America Corp. (BAC) building. The
next day, New York City police halted a march over the Brooklyn
Bridge and took hundreds of activists into custody for blocking
traffic. Some people arrested claimed officers had tricked them
into leaving the pedestrian walkway.
“The huge event on the Brooklyn Bridge is likely to bring
thousands more into the movement,” said T.V. Reed, a professor of
American studies at Washington State University who wrote “The Art
of Protest: Culture and Activism From the Civil Rights Movement to
the Streets of Seattle.”
On placards and in chants, protesters are citing Americans’
frustrations with a financial industry that received unprecedented
taxpayer bailouts while damaging an economy in which unemployment
remains above 9 percent. They aim to put Wall Street on the
defensive, just as firms seek to shape regulations and influence
next year’s general election.
Protests also have been held in San Francisco, and
last week, about 200 people met in a Methodist church in
Philadelphia to organize a similar event in that city, the Philadelphia
Inquirer reported yesterday. (For a slide show of Amy Arbus’s
portraits of Wall Street protesters, click here.)
Demonstrators initially struggled to build momentum, drawing a
fraction of the 20,000 participants that organizers such as
Adbusters, a group promoting the demonstrations, aimed to lure to
lower Manhattan for the Sept. 17 kickoff. Instead, about 1,000
people showed up, and by the time traders and bankers returned to
work two days later, the crowd had dwindled to about 200. The
number of protesters camping in Zuccotti Park a few blocks from the
New
York Stock Exchange fell into the dozens that week.
On Sept. 24, a larger group of weekend protesters watched as a
New York Police Department deputy inspector used pepper spray on
some participants. The incident stoked public interest.
Amateur videos of the episode were posted to Google Inc.’s
YouTube. Celebrities including Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon
and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore stopped by to voice
support. The police department, facing protester accusations that
it had acted improperly, said its Civilian
Complaint Review Board would examine the incident.
“Maybe the pepper spray was a mistake,” Jon Stewart, host of
the news-satire program “The Daily Show,” joked on his Sept. 29
broadcast. “It was a hot day. Maybe that officer was reaching for
his canister of cooling, cucumber-mist spray and grabbed the pepper
spray by accident.”
Provoking police is part of protesters’ strategy to get noticed,
said Michael Heaney, a political science professor at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor who has
researched social movements.
“The police actions give them sympathetic attention,” Heaney
said yesterday in a telephone interview. “The protesters want to be
pepper-sprayed, they want to be arrested,” because if authorities
take actions that may be perceived as unjust, “then that helps
their cause.”
The arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge may have a bigger impact on
public opinion.
“This gets you into the prime time,” said David Meyer, a
professor of sociology at the University
of California at Irvine and author of “The
Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America.” The question
activists face is “‘How do you do something that generates news,
which doesn’t implicate you for being at fault?’ And I guess New
York City police were really helpful in this regard.”
Police gave “multiple warnings” and told protesters to remain on
the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, Paul Browne, an NYPD
spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. Some people complied,
while others blocked traffic. Authorities issued more than 700
summonses and tickets, he said.
New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg supported the police department’s actions on the
bridge.
“The police did exactly what they are supposed to,” he told
reporters yesterday before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade in
midtown Manhattan. New York
“is the place where you can come to express your views. Protesting
is fine, but you don’t have the right to go and without a permit
violate the law.”
The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent
Bloomberg LP.
The protests are part of broader theme of class warfare, which
might help President Barack Obama in
next year’s election, said G. Terry Madonna, a
pollster and political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Still, Wall Street isn’t likely to supplant voters’ primary focus
on jobs and the economy.
“No doubt there is genuine concern about ‘Wall Street Greed,’ ”
Madonna said in an e-mail. “Unless the economy turns around --
translation: the job picture improves, confidence in spending is
restored, and folks think their personal finances will improve --
it won’t be a significant factor in the re- election campaign.”
Another challenge facing demonstrators is their lack of a
focused agenda, said Meyer. As events began in Manhattan,
organizers aimed to get Obama to establish a commission to end “the
influence money has over our representatives in Washington,”
according to the website of Vancouver-based Adbusters.
On the ground, protesters have been less unified, with demands
that ranged from increasing taxes on Wall Street and the wealthy to
ending global warming.
“There’s certainly a potential for starting a movement, but
right now it’s just a series of events and a holder for all
different causes,” Meyer said. “You have people talking about
ending global capitalism, and that doesn’t poll well.”
Yesterday afternoon, people who had been arrested the night
before congregated again in lower Manhattan, celebrating and vowing
to stay put. Musicians strummed guitars, beat drums and played a
saxophone while people danced. A bare-chested singer painted the
words “Lotion Man-Utube” on his torso and bellowed the words
“Occupy Wall Street.” National television networks trolled the
area, broadcasting live updates.
“This is the start of something big,” said Shannon Deegan, a
28-year-old employee of a Seattle technology
company who said she flew to New York Sept. 30 and witnessed the
bridge arrests. She aims to replicate the protests when she returns
home.
Though the incident on the Brooklyn Bridge was initially
discouraging, “the arrests gave us more visibility,” she said.
“People are watching, and they will see our cause.”
from bloomberg
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what took them so long?
isnt it a bit too late to protest?