• 2011-09-16 5:40 PM - Citizens Aim to Occupy Wall Street
  For the live blog go here. The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we [...]


• 2011-09-17 11:53 AM - Live Blogging #TakeWallStreet – Police Decide to Occupy Wall St Instead
  As reported in a previous post, today is the day for Occupy Wall Street, an action that a number of organizers have been planning for lower Manhattan for the past months. Inspired by occupations in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt and other countries where occupations have taken place, organizers began to put together websites and fliers to [...]


• 2011-09-17 8:34 PM - Live Blog for #TakeBackWallStreet: After Hours Edition
  For those of you who haven’t been following the #TakeBackWallStreet or #OccupyWallStreet action, today was the first day of Occupy Wall Street. Background on the inspiration for the action can be found here. A live blog has been running on FDL’s The Dissenter since the action began around noon today. It is night time. A [...]


• 2011-09-18 9:20 AM - Occupy Wall Street’s Modest Call to Action
  This post is republished with permission from agnosticnixie. It is the call the core group, which promoted the action that began on September 17, would like citizens to support. This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution. We want [...]


• 2011-09-18 10:28 AM - Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Two
  Yesterday was the first day of Occupy Wall Street, an action inspired by occupations that have taken place in Egypt, Greece, Spain and other countries over the past months. FDL’s The Dissenter has been covering the action live since it began and will continue to cover especially as significant developments happen. The summary for Day [...]


• 2011-09-18 7:51 PM - Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Two, After Hours Edition
  Hundreds of protesters have been occupying Zuccotti Park, a private park, nearby Wall Street as part of a planned Occupy Wall Street action. The police have put up blockades around Wall Street and prevented protesters from being on the sidewalk areas of Wall Street they hoped to occupy. The protesters have committed to a long-term [...]


• 2011-09-19 9:34 AM - Pizza Orders from Around the World: A Sign #OccupyWallStreet Could Last Awhile?
  *FDL’s live blog of Occupy Wall Street here. For two days now, hundreds of protesters have occupied Zuccotti Park, a private park in and around Wall Street, as part of Occupy Wall Street. (See last night’s live blog here.) The protesters intended to legally assemble and demonstrate on the public sidewalks [...]


• 2011-09-19 10:02 AM - Live Blog for Day 3 of #OccupyWallStreet: Direct Action to Happen Now
  In a private park known as Zuccotti Park, hundreds of protesters have been holding an occupation called Occupy Wall Street to call attention to corporate influence on US politics. The action began on September 17. Protesters were not allowed to go into the area on Wall Street they had planned to occupy because the NYPD [...]


• 2011-09-19 4:52 PM - Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Three, Evening Edition
  Liberato’s Pizza has now officially renamed a pizza after the Occupy Wall Street action happening in a park in lower Manhattan in New York. The pizza is called The Occu-pie and it is 99% cheese, 1% pig. For anyone going, what is Occupy Wall Street? It is an occupation being maintained by hundreds of US [...]


• 2011-09-20 8:14 AM - Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Four, NYPD Attack Camp for Putting Up a Tarp
  Occupy Wall Street put up a tarp overnight. Using trees in the park, the occupation erected a structure, which inevitably meant the New York Police Department was going to tell them immediately this morning they had five minutes to take all tarps down. The protesters opted to hold an emergency assembly to discuss whether to [...]


• 2011-09-20 4:28 PM - Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Four, Evening Edition
  Good evening. FDL continues to cover the latest developments related to Occupy Wall Street. Those who are unaware of what happened over the past twelve to twenty four hours, here is a quick summary: Early in the morning, some time around 7:30 am, the NYPD came over and on a megaphone said that the occupation [...]


• 2011-09-21 6:46 AM - Live Blog of #OccupyWallStreet: Day Five, 99 Percenters Rise Up
  Support for Occupy Wall Street is growing by the hour. Solidarity actions in Chicago, Phoenix and Paris, France, are all getting off the ground. In Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Atlanta, actions are in the works. Each of these may be occupations. And, now there is indication the Industrial Workers of the World [...]


• 2011-09-21 2:59 PM - Troy Davis’ Scheduled Execution: Democracy Now! Broadcasts from Georgia Prison
  Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com The Georgia Pardons & Paroles Board is set to execute Troy Davis at 7 pm ET on International Day of Peace. Troy Davis’ attorneys filed a motion for an emergency stay of execution. Lawyers wrote, according to Huffington Post, “No physical evidence has ever conclusively linked Mr. [...]


• 2011-09-22 9:35 AM - Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Six, Solidarity with Troy Davis
  Between now and yesterday, there have been few significant developments related to the Occupy Wall Street action. There are still hundreds of people camping out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan nearby Wall Street (the park which they have renamed Liberty Park). However, the Occupy Wall Street action did collectively feel a sense of pain [...]


• 2011-09-23 7:48 AM - Live Blog of #OccupyWallStreet: Day Seven, Other US Cities Launch Occupations
  A march for Troy Davis converges with Occupy Wall Street. The grotesque murder of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia and corruption on Wall Street may have been separate issues, but last night the separation ended, at least temporarily. Occupy Wall Street, which had been showing solidarity with Davis, converged with [...]


• 2011-09-24 8:08 AM - Live Blog of #OccupyWallStreet: One Week Later & Growing Stronger by the Day
  The one week milestone has been reached. Occupy Wall Street has struggled and toiled through the week and made through to the weekend. The occupation survived: pouring rain, police harassment and intimidation, a media blackout, media coverage aimed to diminish the significance of the occupation, lack of supplies necessary for holding [...]


• 2011-09-24 3:08 PM - Live Blog of #OccupyWallStreet: NYPD’s Crackdown on the Protest
  Fifty to eighty people have been arrested in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street protest. The NYPD is cracking down on those involved in the action and the NYPD is surrounding Liberty Park (Zuccotti Park) where people have been occupying for the past week. Suspicions are high with many believing those [...]


• 2011-09-25 9:12 AM - Live Blog of #OccupyWallStreet: Day Nine, Pressing On After Mass Arrests Yesterday
  The first instance of police making mass arrests of Occupy Wall Street protesters happened yesterday. Police had not detained a large group of protesters before, preferring to arbitrarily pick off individuals they thought warranted arrest. The harassment, intimidation and violence on display on the streets of New York City yesterday moved [...]

2011-09-25 3:14 PM - NYPD’s Iron-Handed Response to Occupy Wall Street
The New York police department’s (NYPD) massively cracked down people who were out in the streets of New York yesterday for Occupy Wall Street. Thousands came out to participate in a demonstration that has been going on for over a week and the police, unprepared for the number of people protesting, [...]

The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.
— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

Drawing inspiration from Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt and other countries where occupations have taken place in the past months, organizers are preparing to occupy Wall Street in New York on September 17. They have spent weeks planning logistics and building support for the action and hope to see 20,000 swarm lower Manhattan and set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy the area.

The Occupy Wall Street action is not being organized by one organization. A central website was set up by independent organizers to provide support for those seeking to engage in resistance or protest. The action is the result of a call by Adbusters, a Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine known for “culture jamming.” The magazine put out a call on July 13, to come together like people did in Tahrir Square in Egypt and make one demand that President Barack Obama “ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

The call to action further explained the need for such an occupation action:

This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.

This could be the beginning of a whole new social dynamic in America, a step beyond the Tea Party movement, where, instead of being caught helpless by the current power structure, we the people start getting what we want whether it be the dismantling of half the 1,000 military bases America has around the world to the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals. Beginning from one simple demand – a presidential commission to separate money from politics – we start setting the agenda for a new America.

The hacktivist group known as Anonymous has come out strongly in support of the Occupy Wall Street action. Noting that September 17 is Constitution Day, an Anonymous flyer declares:

We will no longer choose to stand still while one of our country’s greatest achievements, the Constitution, is skewed and vandalized by the actions of corporate giants. We will no longer stay quiet while our society is destroyed by the downward spiral of mass consumer capitalism. We will stand up for our rights and the rights of everyone who call the United States their home.

The organizers are keenly aware of the fact that the police—not just any police force but the NYPD—will likely do everything they can to halt the occupation in its first few hours. Since the success of the action depends on being able to keep people engaged and interested in holding space in lower Manhattan, they will do everything they can to split up crowds and disperse them.

[A guide for people planning to participate in the action.]

Those involved hope to use the Spanish occupation in Madrid as their guide. Here’s a quote from Jérôme E. Roos, a journalist who wrote about the encampment last month:

All day long, 300 police officers kept the square hermetically sealed off, even closing the Sol metro station – one of the largest and most important in the city … When the protesters realized they couldn’t take the square, they quickly dissolved into a dozen side-streets and regrouped on a number of key locations … For hours now, protesters have been blocking all the main traffic arteries in the city center … Tens of thousands of indignados have brought Madrid to a complete standstill in a spontaneous and defiant bid to reclaim Puerta del Sol … The mass protest is now reported to be headed back towards Sol for a second time, in another attempt to take back the square.

Thus, Adbusters advises:

If the police block us temporarily from occupying Wall Street, then let’s turn all of lower Manhattan into our Tahrir Square. Let’s sing our songs in the lobby of Goldman Sachs and in Chase Manhattan Plaza; let’s wave our signs outside the SEC and the Federal Reserve; let’s convene our people’s assemblies around the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green … and if need be, let’s set up our encampments in nearby Battery Park and other places until we’re ready to walk into Wall Street again …

The people behind this are quite literally intending to launch a siege on Wall Street. When they get into the area that Wall Street occupies, they hope to take position and use everything and anything available to show the nation and the world how people crave justice for the banksters or casino capitalists that have enjoyed impunity, despite perpetrating an inside job on the US (and global) economy in 2008.

In an article that recounts as many gory details as will fit, the Daily News devotes only two short paragraphs to what the protest is actually about and what protesters have been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” True, but too little. The real story for the Daily News, it seems, is not this unusual kind of protest, or the political situation which it opposes, but the chance to have the word “busted” on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain.

ABC’s Channel 7 Eyewitness News, despite being one of the day’s most zealously-persistent outlets, ran a doubly fallacious headline Sunday morning: “Occupy Wall Street Protest Gets Violent Overnight.” For one thing, the protest itself did not get violent. Protesters attacked nobody. They threw no stones, they carried no weapons. The police got violent. Secondly, the arrests and violence did not happen “overnight” but during the day—an error the article repeats several times. This seems especially odd since the Channel 7 reporter and cameraman were witnesses to what did happen during the night, which their article confusingly splices in with an account of the day’s arrests: a mainly silent, completely peaceful vigil march on the sidewalk to Police Plaza to ask after the protesters arrested that afternoon—with locked arms and peace signs held high—accompanied the whole time by officers carrying orange nets, followed menacingly by empty police vans, and barricaded several times from reaching their destination.

While protesters were stopped at a barricade at Canal and Elizabeth Streets, Channel 7 reporter Darla Miles showed the picture of a protester with his face covered in blood on her Blackberry to help persuade the police to give an update on him. (She was careful to keep it away from the cameras of those who might be able to help publicize it: “Channel 7 News property!”) But they were gone by the time the protesters finally made it near Police Plaza, calling out in unison, “Our Brothers! And Sisters! You Are Not Forgotten!” as well as the phone number of the National Lawyers Guild, eliciting some chuckles from the police.

Soberer outlets missed the point as well. What the Associated Press and Reuters saw was something along the lines of a typical one-day march-in-the-streets protest, only mysteriously happening over more than a single day. They barely mention the sustained occupation of Liberty Plaza, much less what has been happening there and why. The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante at least took the time to visit the plaza, though she doesn’t seem to have stayed long enough to notice its main activity, the General Assembly. There, she would have found that the protesters’ purpose is anything but “impossible to decipher”; they’re busy taking part in a purposely-leaderless, consensus-based process based on people, not money, right in the capital of American corruption.

None of these articles captures what is distinctive about this occupation, or how it works, or what the protesters are doing for most of the day, or the courage they have shown in the face of the brutality. These are common oversights in press coverage of nonviolent resistance movements, but that doesn’t mean there’s any excuse.

The thing is, there are tremendous things happening in and around Liberty Plaza, stories in which these mainly-young protesters are anything but passive recipients of police abuse. I’ve already written about the arrests of protesters like Jason Ahmadi and Justin Wedes, who were also portrayed as victims in the media, but who in fact were arrested on their own terms, for simple, peaceful acts of resistance. One could also speak of the stories of how those arrested on Saturday kept each other’s spirits high by singing and chanting together and trying to woo the police while they were being taken away in plastic cuffs. Watch, for instance, between 1:25 to 3:15 on this clip from the occupation’s 24-hour livestream:

[...]

I also think of things that happened before major news outlets were paying much attention, at times when the watchful crowds were away. At about 9:15 p.m. on Sunday the 18th, for instance, came one of the first police incursions into the plaza, during a General Assembly meeting. I have yet to see it recounted anywhere. The officers ordered, through protesters reporting to the Assembly, that all signs be taken down. There was a fractious reaction at first. Some thought it a reasonable request and wanted to comply. Others refused on principle, not wanting to be taking orders from the police. People made speeches on either side. There were defiant chants of “Occupy Wall Street!” Some took it upon themselves to remove signs, and others tried to stop them, such as by shouting. There were whispers that undercover cops were sowing divisions—though it hardly seemed like the protesters needed any help with that. Just when unity was needed, it wasn’t there. Officers started taking down posters themselves while protesters chanted, “Shame!”

[...]

Events like these are messy, and they’re far from entirely flattering, but they’re human. Properly told, they have the makings of a good story. Reporting accurately and critically on police violence is of course essential—Colin Moynihan of The New York Times has done so extremely well on the paper’s City Room blog—but that is only a small part of the story of what’s going on here. We in the press need to think more highly of our readers, as well as of our own ability to report on stories that don’t depend simply on the shock value of violence, or on cheap-shot ridicule, or on stifling formulas. For many Americans, nonviolent direct actions like this occupation are the best hope for having a political voice, and they deserve to be taken seriously as such.