Occupy Wall Street Protest

GEN Y protests: maybe they'll be more engaged than Gen X, the so-called slackers

A protest of the influence of Wall Street organizations on US policy is being held today near Wall Street.  It aims to do create change in the same way that media savvy young people did in Egypt and union workers did in Wisconsin.

Occupy Wall Street is a “leaderless resistance movement” spearheaded by activist magazine Adbusters. Organizers want people to swarm into lower Manhattan on September 17 and set up camp for two months, then “incessantly repeat one simple demand.”

What’s that demand? They haven’t decided yet.

The plan is to crowdsource the decision. Protestors are set to meet and discuss the issue at the iconic Wall Street Bull statue at noon Saturday, as well as at a “people’s assembly” at One Chase Manhattan Plaza at 3 p.m.

The protestors’ demand will likely be focused on “taking to task the people who perpetrated the economic meltdown,” says Kalle Lasn, the editor-in-chief of Adbusters.

I’ve been following some tweets and it appears the NYC police are not letting any one but Wall Streeters get close the financial district. There is some interesting information on the plans, however, if they manage to get any where near the sphere of influence.

Saturday at noon, a group that calls itself “Occupy Wall Street” is going to try to live up to their name for as long as they can. But first, they’ll be meeting at Bowling Green Park for a program that includes yoga, a pillow fight, face-painting, small break-out groups to discuss topics like derivatives, and a lecture from an author. There’s an arts and culture committee. Plus, there’s yoga and a planned “Thriller” dance. It sounds a little bit like camp, or maybe one of those pre-college orientation bonding sessions. But as the group says on its website, it’s actually a “leaderless resistance movement” meant to protest the concentration of wealth at the top of society — the “99 percent” standing up against the “1 percent.”

Essentially, says Marissa Holmes, a 25-year-old freelance documentarian who’s helped organize the event, it’s meant as a rebuke of “neoliberal economics,” and a youth-driven lefty answer to the tea party. Many of those involved, says Holmes, are young, overeducated, and underemployed. “How do you think we had time to organize this?” she laughed. Anonymous, the hacktivist group, has also released a video in support of the event, though their involvement isn’t official — Holmes told me she was simply waiting, curiously, to see what they might do.

The scenario of an unemployed-young-people uprising is exactly the one Mayor Bloomberg publicly worried about earlier today. The group explicitly cites the Tahrir Square demonstrators as an inspiration. And the critique of neoliberal economics also calls to mind the violent World Bank protests of the nineties in Seattle. But it’s a little unclear how many people will actually show up. The original goal — as proposed by AdBusters, where the event originated — was to gather 20,000 people, but the group’s Facebook page has less than 8,000 who’ve RSVPed.

I’m actually curious to see if any of the networks will even cover it.  The twitter channel to follow is: #TakeWallStreet.  You can watch some livestreams around 3 pm est at Global Revolution.  It will be interesting to see if some of the twitter generation here in the US are any more committed to nonviolent change than other places in the world.  Right now the associated chat channel looks to be spammed by Paultards.

Okay, caption contest: what do you say about police protecting THE bull?