The Occupy Movement began on Sept. 17, 2011, when a diffuse group of activists began a loosely organized protest called Occupy Wall Street, encamping in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned park in New York’s financial district. The protest was a stand against corporate greed, social inequality and the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process.
The idea was to camp out for weeks or even months to replicate the kind, if not the scale, of protests that had erupted earlier in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt.
The group’s slogan — “we are the 99 percent” — touched a raw nerve across the nation. The 1 percent refers to the haves: that is, the banks, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry, etc.; and the 99 percent refers to the have-nots: that is, everyone else.
In the United States, the political impact of the movement was increasingly plain. Democrats offered cautious support and Republicans were generally critical, but both parties seemed to agree that the movement was changing public debate.
The Struggle to Maintain Visibility
In the months since it began, the Occupy Movement has been at risk of fading to the edges of political discourse. Driven off the streets by local law enforcement officials, who have evicted protesters from their encampments and arrested thousands, the movement has seen a steep decline in visibility. That has left Occupy without bases of operations in the heart of many cities and has forced protesters to spend time defending themselves in court, deterring many from taking to the streets again.
With less visibility, the movement has received less attention from the news media, taking away a national platform.
Occupy does not have a traditional leadership structure, making it difficult for the movement to engage in conventional political organizing in support of state legislators and members of Congress, like the
Tea Partyhas. And some activists, angry at politicians across the board, do not see electoral politics as the best avenue for the movement, complicating efforts to chart its direction.
Occupy activists acknowledge that building and maintaining a populist movement is daunting and that the clashes over the right to protest have drained some energy.
Background: Early Days and Gaining Union Support
Within a week of the initial demonstration in Lower Manhattan, the protest grew. On Sept. 24, police made scores of arrests as hundreds of demonstrators, many of whom had been bivouacked in the financial district as part of the protest, marched north to Union Square without a permit. As darkness fell, large numbers of officers were deployed on streets near the encampment in Zuccotti Park, where hundreds more people had gathered.
Efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: protesters were corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police forcibly arrested some participants; and
a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting.
On Oct. 1,
the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators who marched north from Zuccotti Park and tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action, but protesters said they believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting after hundreds had entered.
The protest got reinforcements on Oct. 5, when prominent labor unions — struggling to gain traction on their own —
joined forces with the demonstrators. Thousands of union members marched with the protesters from Foley Square to their encampment in Zuccotti Park.
The two movements may be markedly different, but union leaders maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature. Labor leaders said they hoped Occupy Wall Street would serve as a counterweight to the
Tea Party and help pressure President Obama and Congress to focus on job creation and other concerns important to unions.
Buoyed by the longevity of the encampment in Manhattan, a wave of protests swept across the world, with hundreds and in some cases thousands of people expressing discontent with the economic tides in marches, rallies and occasional clashes with the police.
Other than Rome, where a largely peaceful protest turned into a riot, the demonstrations across Europe were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Similar scenes unfolded across cities on several continents, including in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; Hong Kong; and Toronto.
The Police Response
The actions of the New York police suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism, but that may appear less nimble in dealing with the likes of protesters.
As the protests lurched into their third week, it was often the white shirts — the commanders atop an army of lesser-ranking officers in dark blue — who laid hands on protesters or initiated arrests. Video recordings of clashes showed lieutenants, captains or inspectors leading underlings into the fray.
Police officers, law enforcement analysts and others cited a number of reasons for it. The prevalence of white shirts around Zuccotti Park, the center of the protests, signaled how closely the department monitors high-profile events. Strategies are carefully laid out; guidelines for crowd dispersal are rehearsed; arrest teams are assembled. It is all in an effort to choreograph a predictable level of control.
The Political Response
As the protest entered its fourth week, leading Democratic figures, including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama,
were embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment saw the movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.
But while some Democrats saw the movement as providing a political boost, the party’s alignment with the eclectic mix of protesters made others nervous. They saw the prospect of the protesters’ pushing the party dangerously to the left — just as the
Tea Party had often pushed Republicans farther to the right and made for intraparty run-ins.
Mr. Obama spoke sympathetically of the Wall Street protests, saying they reflected “the frustration” that many struggling Americans were feeling. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, sounded similar themes.
It is not at all clear whether the leaders of the amorphous movement actually want the support of the Democratic establishment, given that some of the protesters’ complaints are directed at the Obama administration. Among their grievances, the protesters say they want to see steps taken to ensure that the rich pay a fairer share of their income in taxes, that banks are held accountable for reckless practices and that more attention is paid to finding jobs for the unemployed.
Leading Republicans, meanwhile, grew increasingly critical of the protests. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, called the protesters “a growing mob,” and Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate, said the protests were the work of “jealous” anti-capitalists.
The Media Take Notice
Coverage of the movement in the first week of October 2011 was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the
Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released by the Pew Research Center.
The data confirmed an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly gained speed in September, had entered the nation’s collective consciousness for the first time when President Obama was asked about it at a news conference and when national television news programs were first anchored from the Wall Street protest site.
In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied
7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable.
The study showed that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage in early October, often with a heavy dose of positive or negative opinion attached.
Some protesters assailed news media outlets for scoffing at their leaderless nature and lack of agreed-upon goals, but some also carefully courted attention from those outlets.
The spike in news media coverage was significant because, among other reasons, it may have lent legitimacy to the movement and spurred more people to seek out protest information on Facebook and other Web sites.
Each City’s Own Stew of Grievances
While the protesters seemed united in feeling that the system was stacked against them, with the rules written to benefit the rich and the connected, they were also just as often angry about issues closer to home, like education and the environment. Each gathering bubbled up from its own particular city’s stew of circumstances and grievances, and the protesters bring along their pantheons of saints and villains.
From late October to December 2011, mayors in cities across the country moved to clear encampments in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco and Boston, among others, with several removal attempts resulting in violent confrontations between police and protesters.
Protesters in other cities rallied to show their support for Occupy Oakland. Demonstrators in Manhattan chanted “New York is Oakland, Oakland is New York” as they moved through the streets of Greenwich Village. Several were arrested. In Washington, one protester was subdued with a Taser.
The Protest Moves to Campuses
During the demonstration, videos were taken of two police officers in riot gear dousing the protesters with pepper spray as they sat on a sidewalk with their arms entwined. The videos were widely distributed over the Internet, with hundreds of thousands watching a relatively small encampment compared with the larger protests across the country.
The attack galvanized protesters on other campuses. Students at the Los Angeles, Berkeley, Riverside and Davis campuses said that they intended to restart their encampments, in part to test whether they would be rousted or arrested in the wake of the pepper-spraying.
In New York, a rally by
City University of New York students against a planned tuition increase turned turbulent when marchers ignored police requests to clear the lobby of a building where the university’s trustees were meeting, and 15 people were arrested. At Baruch College in Manhattan, students were pushed to the ground and taken away in handcuffs from the lobby, while protesting a planned tuition increase for the 2012-13 academic year.
In the Spring, Trying Out a New Tactic
For the third consecutive night, Occupy Wall Street protesters used a tactic that many of them hope will emerge as a replacement for their encampment at Zuccotti Park, which was
disbanded by the police in November 2011.
Norman Siegel, a prominent civil-rights lawyer who visited the protesters, said a decision by a federal court in Manhattan arising from a lawsuit in 2000 allowed the protesters to sleep on sidewalks as a form of political expression so long as they did not block doorways and took up no more than half the sidewalk.
The protesters first cited that ruling in early April 2012,
sleeping outside bank branches near Union Square, but said that they wanted so-called sleep-outs to occur nightly around the New York Stock Exchange. Their presence on and near Wall Street has drawn the attention of the police, but officers have not dislodged them.
Dozens of Occupy encampments around the country were forcibly cleared months previously by police forces, and organizers in New York have acknowledged that it would be difficult to mount a new occupation of a park or plaza. Instead, many of them said, they would rather establish these sleeping spots.
Preparing for a Political Convention
But as the grass began to take root, so did a resilient Occupy Charlotte. A small group was still meeting regularly in the city, participating in targeted protests and planning for Sept. 3, 2012, when the
Democratic National Convention comes to town.
Every four years, the political conventions become magnets for mass protests, but this year the Occupy movement has added an unpredictable element to the mix. In Charlotte, the movement has already shown its clout through the hundreds of protesters who gathered in October 2011 to demonstrate against Bank of America and a resulting encampment on the lawn in front of old City Hall.
But the Occupy movement in Charlotte has been beset by troubles.
There was infighting over leadership within the group at the start, and there were repeated public relations gaffes.
A flag burning in December split the group, and undermined acceptance and support within a skeptical Charlotte community as well.
Occupy Charlotte’s encampment may have had the unintended effect of getting the authorities prepared for convention protests; officials began planning a series of ordinances to manage such demonstrations after Occupy began.
On Jan. 23, the Democratic-controlled Charlotte City Council passed the ordinances, including a camping ban, on a 10-to-1 vote. A week later, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers crossed the street from their headquarters and arrested seven people on the way to dismantling the camp.
Occupy Charlotte members continued to meet regularly and arrange smaller protests, including a daylong event outside a Bank of America branch in town. But without the camp, the number of active members has dwindled just as planning for the convention kicks into high gear.
Bill Dobbs, a member of
Occupy Wall Street’s press team, said there is continuing communication with Occupy Charlotte members as they plan bank and convention protests. And as many as 60 groups have signed on to join the Coalition to Protest at the D.N.C.
In Florida, Occupy Tampa is involved in planning similar efforts for the Republican National Convention, which will be held there in August, but the group has had smaller protests than those in Charlotte and the city has proposed a “clean zone” limiting where demonstrations can be held.
Trying to Make May Day an American Tradition
For decades, workers in Europe, South America and China have been celebrated with an official holiday on May Day.
The United States, however, has not followed suit. (Britain and Canada have tried to wash out the holiday’s leftist hues.) Even though the day’s origins date to a riot in Chicago in 1886 known as the Haymarket massacre, labor is celebrated in the United States in early September.
Socialists and trade union movements have long used May Day as a protest day. And on May 1, the Occupy movement hoped to bring numerous cities to a standstill in commemoration of International Workers Day.
The police said that 34 people were arrested and another 52 issued desk appearance tickets for lesser offenses by the end of a day that also included pickets, marches and rallies in Midtown, Union Square, Washington Square Park and on the Lower East Side.
Alive and Well in Oakland
Last spring, as the Occupy movement struggled, vainly, to recapture its lost energy in New York and elsewhere, in Oakland it remained vital.
Occupy Oakland was the show that wouldn’t close, complete with its own cast of celebrities including Scott Olsen, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran who is the movement’s Ron Kovic; Phil Tagami, a real estate developer who is the city’s Charles Bronson; the city’s mayor, an ex-radical herself; her countless critics; and Oakland’s infamous police department — O.P.D.
In a sense, Oakland is the last place you would expect to find the most stubbornly active outpost of the Occupy movement. It’s a city almost entirely devoid of financial or corporate institutions, a city that “capital” fled decades ago. The shimmering skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, packed with Pacific Heights investment bankers and venture capitalists, are all of 12 minutes away. Silicon Valley, bursting at the seams with dot-com millionaires, isn’t much farther. Why not take the fight there, to a more plausible surrogate for Wall Street?
Maybe because Occupy Oakland, whether its leaders have articulated it or not, isn’t a protest against what Oakland is, but rather what it’s in danger of becoming. Oakland may be broke, but all of the wealth being generated in its immediate vicinity needs someplace to go, and some of that wealth is already beginning to find its way to Oakland, to a place that has long been the catch basin of America’s radical energies and personalities.
Why are radicals so inexorably drawn to Oakland? The cheap rents don’t hurt (free, if you’re willing to squat in an abandoned house or industrial space, and hundreds apparently are). Oakland is urban, dangerous and poor — fertile social conditions for inciting revolution. What’s more, it has a long, easily romanticized history of militancy. America’s last citywide strike, in 1946, took place there; and the Black Panthers were born in Oakland.
Running parallel to this history of political militancy is a history of lawlessness. In the early 1970s, when the Hell’s Angels were scandalizing America, their most infamous clubhouse was located in East Oakland.
Occupy is a dream that still exists in Oakland — that the world can be taken from the haves and delivered to the have-nots. Like all dreams that are on the brink of being extinguished, its keepers cling to it with a fierceness that is both moving and an extreme exercise in the denial of the reality that is at their door.
Frankfurt Camp Closed as a Health Hazard
After a court rejected an appeal by protesters, officers surrounded the park next to the downtown building that houses the bank, blocked off the adjacent streets and began dismantling tents.
Though Frankfurt is a center of global finance and the seat of monetary policy for the euro zone, the city adopted a laid-back attitude toward its local Occupy protest movement when it began in October 2011. By contrast, the New York police arrested nearly 200 people when they
cleared the Occupy Wall Street camp at Zuccotti Park in November, about two months after protesters began gathering there.
Partly as a result, the Frankfurt Occupy encampment lasted longer than many others around the world. An unusually harsh winter posed a greater challenge to the protesters than did the city authorities, who largely ignored the protests. But later reports said that the site housed more homeless people than political activists and that it had become infested with rats.
City officials estimated that about 60 people were living at the site before the police cleared it, while protesters put the number as high as 100. Activists said they chose the site to call attention to what they said was the Central Bank’s lack of democratic accountability, and to protest the austerity measures it has helped impose on deeply indebted countries like Greece.
Though the site in Frankfurt joined a long list of Occupy encampments that have been shut down, some continue, including one in Hong Kong next to the headquarters of HSBC, the international bank."
