On Saturday, September 17, an estimated 2,000 activists gathered in One Liberty Plaza in New York City\u2019s financial district to protest the \u201cgreed and corruption of the 1%\u201d who caused the global financial meltdown. They call themselves the “99 percenters” and they are mostly in their twenties and thirties, unemployed and struggling to find jobs.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s September 20, day four of the Occupy Wall Street<\/a> action,\u00a0and a few hundred protestors remain. They have brought tents and sleeping bags and plan to stay for weeks or even months. They want to send a message to the Lloyd Blankfein\u2019s of the world, to Congress, and President Obama, that there must be meaningful regulation of the financial industry and criminal prosecution of those who brought the economy to its knees. They are demanding that those who wiped out the housing values and retirement accounts of tens of millions of ordinary Americans\u2014and plunged additional tens of millions worldwide into poverty\u2014be brought to justice.<\/p>\n However, they are focused on more than prosecuting criminals. They want deeper changes in government policies beyond the ones currently being proposed, i.e. stimulus, deficit reduction, the promotion of consumption. Michael White and Kalle Lasn, writing for the Guardian,<\/a> report that the protestors want a \u201cRobin Hood Tax”<\/a> on financial transactions, a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act<\/a>, a ban on high-frequency \u201cflash\u201d trading<\/a> and the break-up of too big to fail banks. They want banks that serve the people, the economy and society at large. In addition, they want a whole new way of measuring economic and social progress that goes beyond consumerism. They are dedicated to ending:<\/p>\n Spanish activists and Adbusters<\/em> inspired Occupy Wall Street<\/strong><\/p>\n According to White and Lasn, the Spanish activists who occupied Madrid\u2019s Plaza del Sol <\/a>earlier this year to demand jobs and social and economic reforms inspired Occupy Wall Street<\/a>. The idea was floated \u00a0in August, 2011, in the Sept\/Oct issue of Adbusters<\/a> magazine. Unaffiliated, independent activists immediately spread the “Occupy Wall Street” \u00a0idea through social networks. A plan emerged to enter lower Manhattan on September 17, set up tents, kitchens and peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. They put up a website<\/a> and held an organizing meeting in New York City. 150 people showed up and became the core organizers of the occupation, and the group \u201cAnonymous\u201d<\/a> endorsed the action.<\/p>\n The Spanish indignados<\/em> <\/a>(“the angry ones” who occupied Plaza del Sol)\u00a0planned a solidarity event in Madrid’s financial district. Activists in Milan, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Israel and beyond planned similar events. The companion international movement is called,\u00a0Antibanks: Global Action against banks and banksters.<\/a>\u00a0According to White and Lasn:<\/p>\n There is a shared feeling on the streets around the world that the global economy is a Ponzi scheme run by and for Big Finance. People everywhere are waking up to the realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to $1.3 trillion (50 times more than the sum of all the commercial transactions). Meanwhile, according to a United Nations report, “in the 35 countries for which data exist, nearly 40% of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year”.<\/p>\n “CEOs, the biggest corporations, and the wealthy are taking too much from our country and I think it’s time for us to take back,” said one activist who joined the protests last Saturday. Jason Ahmadi, who travelled in from Oakland, California explained that “a lot of us feel there is a large crisis in our economy and a lot of it is caused by the folks who do business here.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n