Occupy Wall Street: Overview.

On July 13, 2011, the Canadian anticonsumerism organization Adbusters called for a rally to oppose the increasingly prominent role of money in politics. The first Occupy Wall Street rally took place on September 17. Although it drew fewer participants than activists had hoped, the rally resulted in the establishment of an encampment at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, New York City, near Wall Street, which soon became a base for several protest actions throughout New York City.

By the middle of October, the Occupy Wall Street movement had attracted support from several major labor unions, national media coverage, and the attention of the New York Police Department (NYPD). It inspired similar protests in cities around the United States and solidarity rallies worldwide. It also raised a significant amount of money, nearly $600,000, in donations.

The Zuccotti Park camp was ultimately dismantled by the NYPD on November 15. By that time, however, the Occupy Wall Street movement had left its mark on the American political scene, and some analysts suggested that it would continue to influence national party politics as well as conversations in the US about wealth inequality, the right to protest, and other social and economic issues.

Understanding the Discussion

1%: A term used by Occupy Wall Street protesters to refer to the 1 percent of top income earners in the United States and subsequently adopted in mainstream political discourse.

99%: A term used by the Occupy Wall Street activists to refer to more average Americans in contrast to the 1 percent economic elite.

Cyberactivism: The use of websites, e-mail, online forums, and social media to promote a political cause or agenda.

Police brutality: A violation of constitutional prohibitions against cruel treatment and provisions for equal legal protection, in which law enforcement officials use an excessive amount of force to compel a citizen to comply with police demands.

History

Since 1989, the Vancouver-based nonprofit Adbusters Media Foundation has opposed the excesses of the mainstream economic system, inspiring a network of artists and activists from around the world to participate in “culture jamming,” or using the visual and verbal techniques developed within the advertising industry to inspire social change. Adbusters is best known for publishing a bimonthly glossy magazine by the same name, which features articles about innovative approaches to activism around the world and parodies of mainstream ads that call attention to environmental and social justice topics. The group also gained notoriety in the 1990s for launching the annual Buy Nothing Day on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which has historically been one of the most important days for US retail sales.

On July 13, 2011, Adbusters bloggers put out an appeal for activists to congregate in the financial district of downtown Manhattan in order to protest the growing influence of big money in international politics. Adbusters released a promotional poster, featuring a dancer pirouetting atop the famous Di Modica bronze statue titled Charging Bull. This statue is located not far from Wall Street in Bowling Green park and is considered by many to be the most important symbol of the stock trading activities that take place in the financial district. The Adbusters poster included very simple copy, stating “WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND? #OCCUPYWALLSTREET SEPTEMBER 17TH. BRING TENT.”

Adbusters’ use of a hash tag (#) in its poster was meant to mimic the format used on the social media site Twitter and presumably was a call for the message to be spread online. Some commentators have noted that this approach was a conscious emulation of the Arab Spring movement, which made use of Twitter to spread news and information among youth activists in Arab countries throughout early 2011. This tactic proved to be successful for the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement, and news of the impending action rapidly spread online.

On July 26, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement launched its own website as a way of promoting the initial event and remained an important source of information for people involved in and following news of the movement. The website also proved an important means of raising money: the movement ultimately raised around $600,000, mainly from online donations.

Occupy Wall Street gained a major boost when it was endorsed in August by Anonymous, a loose and secretive conglomeration of hackers and cyberactivists informally affiliated with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks group. Much of the detailed planning of the Occupy Wall Street action took place online on obscure forums favored by Anonymous participants. For many Anonymous members, the online discussion about the Occupy Wall Street event was a new focus for their already well-developed use of online communication. Until that point, most Anonymous participants had been involved with relatively limited and solely online actions, such as sabotaging the Oregon Tea Party’s Facebook page in July 2010 and launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal and Amazon.com for refusing to continue to do business with WikiLeaks in December 2010. Occupy Wall Street was the first large-scale, political, and street-level action most Anonymous members executed.

Anonymous members were responsible for much of the movement’s initial publicity, launching videos calling for support and featuring figures in Guy Fawkes masks from the graphic novel V for Vendetta, which were adopted as an unofficial badge of Anonymous. Anonymous and related cyberactivists who participated in the movement also swelled the Occupy Wall Street numbers beyond those participants who came to the camp in person. Anonymous members who did become physically involved in the New York action communicated their experiences via laptops and smart phones to a large and growing cloud of cyberactivists.

Due in large part to the advance planning conducted in cyberspace, the protest developed very rapidly once it physically began in late September 2011. Gatherings took place at Tompkins Square Park early in the month to prepare for a large rally. On September 17, around one thousand protesters met at the Charging Bull statue in Bowling Green Park, marched through the financial district, and then established a camp two blocks from Wall Street at Zuccotti Park.

Located on a single city block bounded by Broadway, Trinity Place, Liberty Street, and Cedar Street, Zuccotti Park is a privately owned public space (POPS) under New York City law. The Zuccotti Park property is owned by Brookfield Office Properties, one of the largest real estate companies in the city, which happens to owe New York City $139,000 in back taxes. The park is named after board cochairman, John E. Zuccotti. According to New York City law, POPS must follow a series of specific guidelines. One of these stipulates that the park must be accessible to the public. Unlike regular city parks, which have enforced opening and closing times, POPS are mandated to stay open to the public twenty-four hours a day.

The number of protesters at the initial march was far fewer than planners anticipated. However, about two hundred people entrenched at Zuccotti Park, and the camp itself was able to develop quite rapidly. Despite some initial resistance from the NYPD, activists set up a tent city, public kitchens serving free food, a reading library with over five thousand books, and Wi-Fi connections. This tent city became the home base for and public face of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The people camped at Zuccotti Park were fairly diverse, both in terms of demographics and ideologies. In the first week of October, Douglas Schoen, an experienced pollster who had worked for the Democratic Party in New York, surveyed people Zuccotti Park. His study found that the gender distribution was roughly equal, at 44 percent female and 56 percent male. The participants ranging greatly in age: 49 percent were between the ages of 18 and 29; 23 percent were between 30 and 39; 15 percent were 40 to 49; 9 percent were 50 to 64; and 4 percent were 65 or older.

Although many members of the wider public perceived the Zuccotti Park campers as unemployed, they actually represented a wide range of employment statuses, with 53 percent describing themselves as employed full time, 18 percent part time, 14 percent as students, and 15 percent unemployed. Of those who said they were unemployed or underemployed, 82 percent said that they had lost their jobs due to the economic downturn.

Although 52 percent of those present said they had been involved with protest movements before, 48 percent stated that they were new to activism. The large majority (69 percent) said they were committed to nonviolence, but 31 percent said that they thought it was appropriate to use violence to achieve their goals. More than one-third said that they hoped the movement would help radicalize the Democratic Party, much in the same way that the Tea Party did the GOP.

A second study conducted between October 14 and 18 by Fordham University professor Costas Panagopoulos found that Occupy Wall Street was made up of participants that did not fit in clear, mainstream political categories. This study found that the overwhelming majority of the three hundred respondents, 97 percent, were unhappy with the job Congress was doing and 73 percent were similarly frustrated with President Obama. Fewer than half (42 percent) said they were likely to vote for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in the upcoming elections, while 2 percent said they would favor Republican candidates.

Although some people stepped forward on a voluntary basis to act as facilitators, the movement did not have official leaders. Decisions were made on a consensus basis. Each evening, open meetings were held to make practical and strategic decisions. Each person who wanted to speak could, provided that he or she was willing to wait in a line, which was called a “stack.” Women and people of color were allowed to go first, and white males were made to wait. This practice was referred to as a “progressive stack” system and was controversial within the movement itself.

Since microphones or bullhorns were not allowed at the event under New York City law, the movement employed what it called “the people’s mic” to make sure everyone could hear the issues for decision. Each speaker would say a sentence, and then everyone within earshot would yell it back, allowing the statement to be heard by everyone present. Decisions were made by a kind of direct democracy. Listeners who agreed with statements or directions of action would wave their outstretched fingers with palms open, and those who disagreed would turn their hands down and wave their fingers.

Critics of Occupy Wall Street dismissed the movement for its seeming lack of a single, uniform set of demands. Participants expressed a range of viewpoints, including, but not limited to, calling for Wall Street executives involved in the financial crisis that began in 2008 to be punished, strengthening labor rights, housing the homeless, abolishing the Federal Reserve, and campaign finance reform. The one message that seemed to be consistent was the call for economic equality.

In October 2011, the Congressional Budget Office released a report on household income in the United States. It stated that people of average means, as represented by the top 60 percent of wealth, had seen their income rise by around 40 percent between 1979 and 2007. Poorer households, the bottom 20 percent, had experienced an increase of 18 percent in income. In contrast, the wealthiest of Americans experienced astronomical income growth, with the earnings of the top 1 percent rising 275 percent. The 1 percent, the wealthiest elite, who made around $380,000 in 2011, became a symbol of the growing wealth gap for those in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Protesters often referred to this 1 percent, in contrast to ordinary Americans, whom they described as the 99 percent.

Using the Zuccotti Park camp as an organizational base, the motley assortment of protesters staged marches and rallies throughout New York City. One of the initial post-September 17 marches took place on September 24, with a march to Union Square. Although a relatively small march, consisting of no more than several hundred participants, this September 24 rally gained media attention because around eighty-five peaceful protesters were arrested and pepper sprayed by police as they approached Union Square.

Another, larger march took place on October 1, with several thousand marchers attempting to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Around seven hundred were arrested, reportedly for blocking the traffic lane. According to many eyewitnesses, police set up orange plastic fences that channeled marchers into the traffic lane and away from the pedestrian walkway. There was a widespread perception within the movement that most of the October 1 arrests were unfair, since the police seemed to have directed marchers into the traffic lane in the first place.

The movement experienced significant growth on October 5, 2011, when it gained support from organized labor, which is also very concerned about the growing economic inequality in the United States. The AFL-CIO gave Occupy Wall Street its verbal support. A rally of up to fifteen thousand people marching from Foley Square to Zuccotti Park was attended by representatives from several major unions, including the United Auto Workers, United Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union, and Transport Workers Union.

On October 6, the expanded Occupy Wall Street movement spread. Tens of thousands of activists staged similar protests throughout the United States, emulating the loose structure and occupying tactics of the original New York protest. The largest of these new Occupy movements were in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. In the next week, rallies were also held in major international cities, including London, Berlin, Rome, Toronto, and Tokyo, to express solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

One of the last major Occupy Wall Street marches in New York took place on October 15, with an estimated five thousand protestors converging on Times Square to call attention to the excesses of military spending. Protestors called for an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a dramatic decrease in defense spending, which they feel has ballooned to unsustainable levels. This was a relatively peaceful event, with only three arrests, far fewer than at many other Occupy Wall Street actions.

Brookfield Office properties, the Zuccotti Park owner, began pressuring the New York government to clear the park in early October, citing concerns that the occupying camp was doing damage and posing a disease and fire threat. Mayor Bloomberg initially resisted this pressure. In the early morning hours of November 15, however, the NYPD began dismantling the camp, tearing down the densely crowded tent village, forcing campers to leave the park with all of their personal possessions and seizing communal property, including over five thousand books at the Occupy Wall Street library. Campers were originally told that they would be allowed to reenter the park after it was cleaned; however, a police contingent remained in place to ensure that no one slept in Zuccotti Park in the following weeks.

In response to being kicked out of their encampment, Occupy Wall Street protesters called for a day of action on November 17, 2011. This was estimated to be the largest rally to date. Activists claimed it an overwhelming success, drawing more than thirty thousand to march through downtown Manhattan. It was also a busy day for the NYPD, who also came out in large numbers and arrested 175 protesters.

Occupy Wall Street Today

Despite its rather poorly attended initial protest on September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement eventually grew into a much larger protest and had a fairly strong impact on American culture. The primary reason for this was clearly the amount of media coverage it received, which was ultimately far more than that given to larger protests such as antiwar or labor rallies in the years preceding it. In the beginning, protesters complained that they were being marginalized by the mainstream media and not getting the coverage their story deserved. Particularly after the October 5 rally attended by labor union representatives, Occupy Wall Street became an important daily staple for many news outlets. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, it accounted for 10 percent of the news the week of October 9, 2011, and then 5 percent in the following three weeks.

One reason for the high rate of media attention was the celebrity presence around the movement. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore was an early visitor to Zuccotti Park and spoke on September 26 about corruption on Wall Street. Actress Susan Sarandon visited the park the next day, both to show her support and to urge the protestors to adopt a more concrete message, which went unheeded. At a press conference in Japan in early November, actor Brad Pitt talked about how Occupy Wall Street was a sign of Americans’ frustration with a system that has failed them. On several occasions in November 2011, President Obama referred to the Occupy Wall Street movement as representing why he ran for the presidency in 2008, describing his base as “the 99 percent.”

Another reason for the strong media interest in the movement was the police response. The constant police presence at Zuccotti Park and at even very small Occupy Wall Street marches seemed excessive both to protesters and outside observers. As of November 17, the NYPD had spent an estimated $7 million in overtime during the protests and set up a mobile observation tower at Zuccotti Park that remained even after the protest encampment was dismantled. There were also widespread allegations of police brutality, especially at the September 24 march to Union Square, the October 1 attempt to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and the November 15 dismantling of the Zuccotti Park encampment. The distribution of numerous amateur and professional videos showing what appeared to many observers to be excessive use of force by the NYPD, including the use of pepper spray against peaceful protesters, resulted in disciplinary action for some NYPD officers and a call for further investigations from some community leaders, including Congressman Jerry Nadler.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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