raining in Liberty Plaza Saturday afternoon as the shrunken crowds fall in around the Occupy Wall Street media center, which still isn't allowed a tent. They're keeping the laptops and livestream (which reports 13,000 viewers at one point, from around the world) under a large picnic umbrella and some tarps, and every now and then the call "mic check!" rings out and someone jumps atop a table to relay the latest from the protesters kettled on the Brooklyn Bridge, cuffed, and being loaded onto giant NYPD buses for dispersal to various locations.
The
"People's Mic" is one of the most striking features of the "Occupy Wall
Street" community that has sprung up down in the heart of New York's
financial district. Because NYPD hasn't allowed amplification, speakers
confine themselves to short half-sentences, that are repeated back by
the crowd. It makes every statement communal--in addition to wiggling
your fingers downward if you disagree, or rolling your arms around if
you want the person to hurry up and finish, you often simply stop
repeating. There's an engagement, a type of consent that it creates,
which is demonstrated when Congressman Charles Rangel shows up
just before the march to show his support--Rangel is greeted by the
horde of reporters thrusting the microphones not allowed protesters in
his face, but Rangel's words don't get repeated to the crowd--instead,
the most striking feature of his attempt to speak is the crowd's
reaction to a heckler who got in Rangel's face. The crowd immediately
took up the chant "Sit down!" and then "This is a peaceful march!"
echoing across the plaza.
There's
only one round of shout-backs necessary in the small crowd during
Saturday afternoon, but later that night, at about 7:30 PM, the reports
from the legal team are echoed back in waves. It's almost soothing;
combined with the professionalism from the legal team volunteer, who
tells the crowd that they have names of 100 confirmed arrested and have
dispatched lawyers to get them out, you almost forget that friends,
colleagues are standing in the rain on the bridge.
(Photo by Michael Whitney)
AlterNet's Kristen Gwynne
is one of those stuck in the bridge when the police closed off both
ends and came in with the plastic cuffs. "They're arresting us one by
one. I just asked a cop and they said they're going to arrest all of us.
There are hundreds of people who dont have room to sit down. We're just
crammed in," she reports by phone.
Later,
she texts, "Now it's pouring and we're huddled five people to an
umbrella. People just sang that [Rihanna] song "you can get under my
umbrella." Spirits are high and people are sharing what they have and
coming together to protect each other."
The
relationship with the police stationed around the park has been
remarkably good, but marches have been contested. The Saturday crowd
proves that Friday's attendance wasn't just a fluke brought on by a
rumor that Radiohead would play for the protesters, and thousands of
people join the march--as we pass, the boy clinging to a drainpipe and
counting protesters shouts out "1200 and counting!" When visiting UK
journalist Laurie Penny
and I turn back, we squeeze past easily as many people as were ahead of
us. A couple of marchers have a giant balloon cluster floating above
with a camera dangling from it, getting a bird's-eye view of the
crowds.
When the texts and Twitter reports start to flood in that arrests are happening on the bridge, that even a New York Times reporter
is being held, we rejoin the now-smaller crowd in Liberty Plaza to find
out if there's any news. Reports are confused--some say that you can
get off the bridge on the Brooklyn side, and indeed I receive a report
from a colleague that he's on the other side at Cadman Plaza. The
jubilant tweets that the police were allowing marchers into the traffic
lanes have turned to fear and anger at what many perceive as a trap.
Surprisingly quickly, facilitators call "mic check!" and ask anyone who
has a smartphone to go to the base of the bridge and record what they
see--including clear instructions on a specific app that can be
downloaded to stream video instantly to the Web.
From
the park, we briefly return to the base of the bridge to see a mass of
police officers blocking the entrance to the traffic lanes. The crowd
gathered there is mostly pointing cameras and smartphones at the police,
but with no one moving on or off the bridge, the scene is tense.
Protesters call "Join us!" and "Police are the 99 percent!" at the
officers, who stand impassive, making no moves to arrest anyone or to
allow anyone, on foot or on vehicles, from either direction, past. In
the rain, we return to Liberty Plaza and the media tent, hoping for
better news updates, and check updates on our phones.
Even
as the NYPD was corralling and cuffing protesters on the bridge, new
support was rolling in for the occupiers. Leo Gerard of the United
Steelworkers union, North America's largest industrial union with 1.2
million active and retired members, made a resounding declaration of support:
"The United Steelworkers (USW) stands in solidarity with and strongly supports Occupy Wall Street. The brave men and women, many of them young people without jobs, who have been demonstrating around-the-clock for nearly two weeks in New York City are speaking out for the many in our world. We are fed up with the corporate greed, corruption and arrogance that have inflicted pain on far too many for far too long."
Working
America, the AFL-CIO's community affiliate which organizes non-union
workers, releases a statement as well, offering support and
encouragement to the protesters. "It's obvious what has motivated these
protests, and it's the same thing we hear at the doors we knock on every
day," the statement reads.
News
also came in that the NYPD, which according to protesters has not
allowed its officers to even accept donuts from protesters in the
square, gratefully took $4.6 million from JP Morgan Chase, one of the Wall Street banks targeted by the protesters, in donation to its foundation.
New Yorker and Naked Capitalism blogger
Yves Smith writes of the gift, "The Foundation has been in existence
for 40 years. If you assume that the $100 million it has received over
that time is likely to mean “not much over $100 million” this
contribution could easily be 3-4% of the total the Foundation have ever received."
The
news coming in just as the reports were hitting that police had
actually led protesters onto the car-traffic section of the bridge
certainly sets the crowd humming (video below shows police marching
ahead of the crowd onto the bridge):
Michael
Whitney, who was marching with the crowd onto the bridge, tells me, "No
one knew we were going over the bridge." He says that the march
stopped, then proceeded onto the traffic lane on the bridge, led by
police. "We walked past dozens of police officers who said nothing to
us--in the middle of the march, with 1200 people ahead of us. I thought
out loud it felt like a trap and a bad idea."
Whitney
continues, "When it became clear police were blocking us from Brooklyn
on the walkway and the roadway, we knew it was only a matter of time
before arrests began. We started walking against the crowd back towards
Manhattan. That's when we saw a sergeant and two officers walking up
the pedestrian walkway, and multiple police vans driving on the
roadway. They were getting everybody off the bridge, including the hot
dog vendor and an old couple on a bench."
Smith
comments, "We simply don’t know whether the police would have behaved
one iota differently in the absence of the JP Morgan donation. But it
raises the troubling perspective that they might have."
No one knows yet what the next few days will bring; Wednesday will see a march in solidarity with the occupiers
which will include The United Federation of Teachers; 32BJ SEIU &
1199 SEIU; Workers United; Transport Workers Union Local 100, as well as
the Working Families Party, Moveon.org, Make the Road New York, the
Coalition for the Homeless, the Alliance for Quality Education,
Community Voices Heard, United New York and Strong Economy For All.
Occupations
have sprung up around the country, and with the growing media coverage,
the word is spreading fast. With union support comes money and an
infrastructure used to planning rallies, strikes and protest actions,
and with the community groups come people who aren't on social media but
understand all too well the impact of bankers' greed. The first edition
of the "Occupied Wall Street Journal", professionally printed as a
broadsheet, was handed out along the parade route, and the occupiers
issued their first official statement Saturday as well.
The statement reads, in part:
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
Hena Ashraf, who joined the protests this week, details in a blog post
the process by which the official statement was composed and edited;
her account highlights both the drawbacks and the strengths of the
movement. She writes of calling the facilitators out for unacknowledged
white privilege, the way the consensus-based decision-making process
worked, and how the protesters learn from each other. "We walked away
realizing what we had just done - spontaneously come together, demand
change, and create it, in a movement that we are in solidarity with,
but also feel a need for constructive criticism," she writes.
The
crowd at the end of the night is unbowed, the mood still jubilant, in a
"the flag was still there" sort of way. The square is full again, full
of wiggling fingers of assent, echoes of news, dotted with Guy Fawkes
masks turned backwards and 1199 SEIU ponchos, brought down from the
union. Kristen is released from jail late at night; other protesters are
also freed the same evening. Jeff Rae, one of those arrested, tweets pictures from inside his cell before his release, and says
he is charged with "failure to obey order, prohibited use of roadway,
and blocking traffic." Their resolve is only hardened by their time
singing songs of support on the bridge, the honks of support from
passing cars, the growing protests around the country, and the cheers
back in Liberty Plaza.
*Photos, unless otherwise noted, are by Sarah Jaffe.
By Sarah Jaffe
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