Occupy Goes Nationwide Tent Cities

TENT CITIES
The New York protesters, camped out in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, have sometimes been dismissed by Wall Street passersby or cast in the mainstream media as naive students and mischief-makers without realistic goals.
Members of the group have vowed to stay at the park through the winter.
The protesters have complained of a heavy-handed police response to the protests. Police say they gave protesters ample warning that their march across the Brooklyn Bridge was illegal before they started making arrests.
Attorneys for a nonprofit advocacy group called the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed a federal lawsuit against Mayor Michael Bloomberg, police and other officials charging the constitutional rights of the demonstrators arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge had been violated.
The suit said New York had “engaged in a premeditated, planned, scripted, and calculated effort to sweep the streets of protesters and disrupt a growing protest movement.”
The protests appeared to be gaining steam across the nation. In Los Angeles, protesters camped out in front of City Hall. They too have pitched a tent city, and organizers say they will be there for the foreseeable future.
In Boston, protesters have set up a make-shift camp in the city’s financial district, with a few dozen tents pitched across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston building. Protesters have been well behaved, Boston police said.
“Occupy Wall Street has captured everyone’s imagination,” said protester Larry Hales in New York.
“One criticism of us has been that our demands are not clear, but I think for most people, the message of why Wall Street is the target is very clear,” he said. “It’s the banking capital of the world.”
Protests have also popped up in Chicago, where around 50 protesters have gathered at the heart of the financial district around lunchtime every day, banging drums and holding signs.
In St. Louis, about two dozen people carrying signs protested Tuesday at a downtown federal building, about four blocks from the city’s landmark Arch.
“People are starting to notice that this movement is not just a flash mob,” said Victoria Sobel, 21, an art student who has been with Occupy Wall Street since it began in September.
“I think labor and community organizations held back at first because they wanted to see our commitment. They wanted to see how serious we were,” she added. “We are elated that this is spreading. If nothing else comes from this, at least we started a dialogue.”
Ellen Wulfhorst, Reuters

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