What caused Occupy Wall Street?
The Occupy Wall Street movement was a spontaneous civil action inspired by the perceived inequality of classes in the United States. The exact origins of this movement are unknown, but its actions and influence cannot be dismissed in any way. By far, the participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement represented sentiments found in youth culture.
What happened to Occupy Wall Street?
While the movement failed to see any of its goals or policy proposals come to fruition, years later, Occupy Wall Street is still considered a blueprint for decentralized activism. The protest was organized by members of Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, including founder Kalle Lasn and editor Micah White.
Who organized Occupy Wall Street?
Who organized Occupy Wall Street? The Canadian anti-consumerist and pro-environment group/magazine Adbusters initiated the call for a protest. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector.
What is the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, against economic inequality. The Canadian anti-consumerist and pro-environment group/magazine Adbusters initiated the call for a protest. Click to see full answer.
Why did the Occupy Wall Street movement happen?
Occupy Wall Street was a movement initiated in 2011 to protest the corporate greed and widespread economic inequality that was experienced across New York and the country as a whole. This protest consumed the city, as tens of thousands of individuals participated, and the protest dominated the news cycles for months. New York itself played a key role in this protest, as it represented both the center for economic prosperity in the United States, but also a constant reminder of the financial inequality inherent within the city itself. The efforts by the protesters also consumed the physical space of the city, as multiple unique facets were utilized within the protest to contribute to its effectiveness. Occupy Wall Street was a profound moment in the history of New York City, as it stood up for values held by many, against the power held by a few.
When did the Occupy Wall Street protest end?
This protest ended in November of 2011, as the New York Police Department (operating under the guidance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg) raided Zuccotti Park and cleared it of protesters, as it was to be cleaned. Allegedly, the police removed tarps and tents from the park and began placing them into dumpsters. [15] Despite the end of the protest in New York, the movement spread into an even larger movement, labeled as simply “Occupy”. This movement is sometimes associated with anarchism, but largely stands for the ideology of the original protest, fighting against the greed that has dominated the United States for decades. Although the Occupy Wall Street movement was abruptly ended, it had far-reaching implications for the wide range of economic protests that have occurred in the years since the occupation of Zuccotti Park.
Why was Zuccotti Park important to Occupy Wall Street?
Zuccotti Park served to make Occupy Wall Street an incredibly visible protest, as it was impossible to be in this region of the city without sight of the movement. The park was a popular site for visitation before the protest, and by taking over the physical space in such a dramatic fashion, the protest dominated news cycles and conversations for weeks. [14] Wall Street workers themselves were forced to encounter Occupy Wall Street, a constant reminder of the values of the protest and the insinuation of guilt for these wealthy members of society.
What was the rallying cry for the 99%?
The rallying cry for these passionate New Yorkers became “we are the 99%”, indicating the quantity of wealth held by the extremely elite of the city compared to the masses while also commenting on the sheer size of the movement in comparison to the elites. [4] This rhetoric expanded to include other powerful chants, all accusing the banking industry with uncontrollable greed and predatory practices against the less privileged. [5] One author described the central theme of the protest as “driven by ‘anxiety about the economy [and] belief that big institutions favored the reckless over the hard-working”. [6] These themes were central to the efforts of Occupy Wall Street, as the protesters banded together, joining their voices as one and fighting for the economic privileges that had been withheld for years.
What is the Occupy movement?
Despite the end of the protest in New York, the movement spread into an even larger movement, labeled as simply “Occupy”. This movement is sometimes associated with anarchism, but largely stands for the ideology of the original protest, fighting against the greed that has dominated the United States for decades.
What was the central point of the Occupy Wall Street movement?
At the center of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the New York Stock Exchange. The protesters intentionally set up camp close to this building, and targeted the values the stock exchange stood for, including corporate greed and income inequality.
Where did Occupy Wall Street take place?
Brooklyn Bridge. One significant protest during Occupy Wall Street took place on the Brooklyn Bridge, resulting in the arrest of many protesters. This was one of the rare occasions of Occupy Wall Street moving out of Zuccotti Park. New York Stock Exchange.
What is the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Movement. Occupy Wall Street represents a new kind of social protest movement in the 21st century. It was created online and used web-based technology and social media to create a public dialogue around the topic of income inequality in America. It was the first protest movement of the Millennial generation and its ideals are represented by social ...
How did the Occupy movement start?
The movement started quietly, but quickly gained attention after police disrupted protest marches in Union Square and on the Brooklyn Bridge. As videos of police arresting and using pepper-spray against peaceful protesters circulated on YouTube, the mainstream media began to pay closer attention. As awareness spread, protestors started Occupy movements in other cities across America. Websites and social media were used by participants to communicate the objectives of the OWS campaign to outsiders and to organize the movement’s activities.
What were the causes of the OWS movement?
They understood that riots, looting, and destruction of property would undermine their moral position. While some OWS protestors wanted to engage in violent acts to garner attention to the cause, others pointed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement as an example of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest. The nonviolent popular movements that overthrew corrupt governments in Tunisia and Egypt, often called the “Arab Spring,” also inspired the early leaders of the Occupy movement. They believed the same tactics – large scale occupation of public spaces and creative use of technology and social media – could be used to unite protestors around the perceived injustices of the US financial system (Jensen and Bang, 2013).
Why did OWS protestors want to engage in violent acts?
While some OWS protestors wanted to engage in violent acts to garner attention to the cause, others pointed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement as an example of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest.
Why did the OWS movement start?
The OWS movement began as a reaction to the effects of the 2007-2010 financial recession in America. The US housing markets experienced a violent crash in late 2008. This sudden drop in housing equity left homeowners deeply in debt and pushed the nation’s financial institutions to near collapse.
What is the use of technology in protest?
The use of technology – particularly social media – to organize protests and communicate goals, objectives and activities is a new form of social movement that constitutes a break from the protest movements of the past.
How did technology help the OWS movement?
Technology provided the platform for OWS members’ concerns by creating a “virtual space” for public dialogue. Web sites and social media were the perfect vehicles for the OWS message because the internet was a radically democratic form of communication; anyone could post their ideas and suggest activities to further their cause. The use of technology – particularly social media – to organize protests and communicate goals, objectives and activities is a new form of social movement that constitutes a break from the protest movements of the past. This type of action community “pursues common projects even though its members may display irreconcilable differences, whether social, cultural, religious, or ethnic. In fact, such differences tend to be regarded as a resource for, rather than a barrier to, doing things in common" (Jensen and Bang, 2013, p. 447). The OWS movement provides a template for modern social protests in its use of technology to unite people in common causes despite traditional cultural differences.
What is the catchphrase of the Occupy movement?
The Occupy protesters made the catchphrase "We are the 99%" part of the national conversation.
When did protesters rally in New York?
Protesters rally in 2012 near the New York Stock Exchange on Occupy Wall Street's second anniversary.
What did Gandhi protest against?
On March 12, 1930, Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi led a nonviolent protest against the British Empire. The march protested the British tax on salt, a necessity of everyday life. Gandhi called for Indians to illegally make salt or buy it illegally.
Why was Rosa Parks arrested?
Rosa Parks became an inspiration for the modern civil rights movement when she was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. For 381 days, African-Americans boycotted public transportation to protest Parks' arrest and, in turn, segregation laws. The boycott led to a 1956 Supreme Court ruling desegregating public transportation in Montgomery. Soon after, Parks was photographed near the front of a bus in what became an enduring image of the civil rights movement.
What happened to Freddie Gray in Occupy Wall Street?
A man attempts to calm a fellow demonstrator as they face police in Baltimore in April 2015. Riots broke out after the funeral for Freddie Gray, who died of a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.
When did the pepper spray break up the Occupy protests?
Police Lt. John Pike at the University of California, Davis, uses pepper spray to break up Occupy UC Davis protesters on the school's quad on November 18, 2011. This image sparked controversy amid the Occupy protests and fueled the flames for protesters.
Where did the pacifists demonstrate?
A pacifist demonstrates in Santa Monica, California, on June 15, 1968. Photos: Protests past and present. PHOTO: Bettmann/CORBIS. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter run at the 1968 Olympic Games, raise their fists in the Black Power salute on October 16, 1968, in Mexico City.
What was the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement?
The brilliant slogan “We are the 99%” captured the imagination not only of the participants, but of large swathes of the broader American public as well, and for good reason. Over the previous decades, there had been an epoch-making upward re-distribution of income to the top 1% and above, and capital and the rich had established the sort of stranglehold on politicians and government not seen since the Gilded Age. During the fall months of 2011, thousands participated in Occupy encampments in cities from coast to coast while tens of thousands participated in marches and protest demonstrations organized by the movement, and Occupy emerged as the largest and most important social movement in the United States since the 1960s and 70s. Occupy Wall Street and its offspring were the first serious response from working people and the citizenry at large to the economic crisis of 2008, playing the role that in another country or in earlier times might have been played by a mass labor movement or an emergent populist or socialist party. Occupy’s declaration represented a wide-ranging radical challenge to the economic and political establishment and to the status quo such as we had not seen since the civil rights/Black Power struggle, the anti-war movement, and Students for Democratic Society (SDS).
What are the problems of Occupy Wall Street?
Another problem has been that Occupy’s social composition in most places remained predominantly white. By and large, Occupy has failed to find a way to engage African American, Latino and immigrant communities. While in most cities African Americans and Latinos were among the leaders of Occupy, and while in some places activists of color rallied to the movement, still Occupy never had a deep involvement in communities of color. To its credit, Occupy in various cities created Occupy the Hood groups, many of them led by African American and Latino activists. Yet, those groups have had limited success in most places. Women and LGBT activists in many cities also complained that they suffered both exclusion from the leadership and harassment as participants, but also that they were told that their issues were divisive. Occupy has had less success in addressing that problem.
Why Has Occupy Stalled and Where Do We Go Now?
The principal reason that Occupy has stalled in most areas was simply the tremendous repression of the movement coordinated at the highest levels of the U.S. government and executed by state and local authorities – the sweeping of the occupiers from the parks , the enormous number of arrests, the violent physical attacks with truncheons, tear gas, and in some instances the firing of rubber bullets. When the Occupiers had been driven from the public spaces, the police occupied them. Behind all of this was a massive surveillance of the Occupy movement accompanied by schemes and plots created by police and agents provocateurs to entrap Occupy activists and then charge them with terrorism. Mostly Occupy failed to achieve all that it might have because it was violently strangled in the cradle by the police.
How did Occupy Chicago affect the unions?
A local socialist Occupy activist described a “partnership” there between Occupy, the unions and community activists. The key factors in Chicago Occupy’s construction of successful relations with the unions seem to have been the presence of a large number of socialists, the existence of a rank-and-file caucus that had recently taken power in the Chicago Teachers Union, and local union officials anxious to find support for their various beleaguered organizations. The fact that there was not more conflict in Chicago between Occupy and the unions may be because the unions engaged in no mass struggles where Occupy’s more militant tactics might have challenged them.
What was the utopian character of the Occupy movement?
Many of those involved in Occupy wanted not only to overcome the immediate effects of the economic crisis—they wanted a better life, a better country, a better world. Many joined the movement because of the sense of community that it had created; a community which they believed prefigured in a small way the national community they desired. The movement as such had no ideology. Occupy was populism of a left wing sort: the people versus big business and bad government. Though there are anarchists and they gave it some of their style, it is not an anarchist movement. Though there are some socialists in it, the movement is by no means socialist. What was perhaps best and most exciting about the movement was the confluence of the many social movements with middle class and working class people who have come down to Wall Street or in some other town or city down to Main Street to say, “We’ve had it.” The utopianism of the movement has inspired ordinary people to think and to say, “We can live differently, we must, and we will.”
What were the antecedents of the Occupy movement?
The Occupy movement’s antecedents can be found most clearly in the anti-globalization and global justice movement that preceded and then rapidly expanded after the Battle of Seattle, the massive environmental and labor protests against the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999. The Battle of Seattle, bringing together a range of environmental organizations and unions such as the United Steel workers, Teamsters, and International Longshore and Warehouse Union to shut down the streets of Seattle, provided a model of militant direct action against corporate globalization. Never anti-capitalist, the global justice movement’s massive and militant demonstrations of radical youth, environmentalists, and labor unions at a series of international trade and policy meetings of government and corporate leaders around the world over several years represented a significant, radical social movement, if not a national mass movement such as we had seen in the 1960s and 1970s or as we saw again with the coming of Occupy.
How did the Occupy movement define itself?
The Occupy movement defined itself negatively as the rejection of traditional social movements and political organizations which had so often failed. Movements, unions and parties all had representative and delegated leadership structures where the leaders soon escaped the control of the members. Occupy would have none, adopting the old slogan: “We are leaderless. We are all leaders.” Other organizations operated through cumbersome forms of government and administration which made government opaque. Occupy would operate simply through its apparently transparent general assemblies and its participatory and autonomous action committees. Other groups made demands. Occupy declined to make specific demands in large part as a defense against cooptation by the Democratic Party, the labor unions, and the left all of which urged the movement to define itself by a list of economic and political demands. Demands seemed to be the first step toward institutionalization and co-optation. While all of Occupy’s practices may be criticized, they arose as part of a healthy rejection of everything of the undemocratic, bureaucratic, and stifling about typical movements, unions and parties. Occupy represented an idealistic if naïve attempt to begin society and politics anew, transparent, democratic, and participatory.
What did Occupy protests do?
At its core, Occupy made protesting cool again—it brought the action back into activism— as it emboldened a generation to take to the streets and demand systemic reforms : racial justice, women’s equality, gun safety, the defense of democracy. As the Occupy veteran Nicole Carty told me, “We can’t unlearn the 99 percent. Now what you have is a whole generation that is growing up in movement times, which explains all the escalation you’re seeing and the work that’s happening among very young people who were still kids during Occupy.”
How did Occupy Wall Street affect politics?
But perhaps Occupy Wall Street’s most seismic and discernible impact has been on politics itself— shifting the window of what is deemed politically acceptable discourse and pulling the nation to the left. Prior to Occupy, no mainstream legislator in Washington dared to criticize capitalism’s thorough corruption of our politics: the obscene wealth gap, the laws designed by corporations, the billionaires evading taxes, and the revolving door that keeps the 1 percent in charge. That all changed with Occupy, which declared that economic injustice and inequality were deliberate outcomes of policies shaped by Wall Street’s greed. By framing the populist economic message that thrust anti-corporate lawmakers such as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez into the electoral spotlight, Occupy Wall Street arguably did more in six months to move American politics to the left than the Democratic Party was able to do in six decades. Which raises the question: Could Sanders and his political revolution have been possible before Occupy shattered decades of silence about income inequality? Not likely.
How did Occupy Wall Street change the world?
In dollars-and-cents terms, Occupy changed the way Americans understood their role in the economy, inaugurating a decade of labor unrest as employees became activists and workers rediscovered their power. In the fall of 2012, a year after protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park, Occupy organizers working in coalition with unions and nonprofits took the message of economic justice to those most ready to hear it: low-wage earners seeking a $15 minimum wage. When the first several hundred fast-food workers in New York City walked off their jobs demanding higher pay, better working conditions, and the right to form a union, that marked a breakthrough for organized labor, opening a new workers’ front known as the Fight for $15.
What did Evan Weber say about the Occupy movement?
When I interviewed Evan Weber for my book about Occupy and its legacy, he agreed that the movement played an essential role in igniting a new progressive era—one that might finally be on the verge of achieving transformational social, economic, and electoral reforms. “AOC wouldn’t have run if Bernie’s campaign wasn’t as successful as it was, and Bernie’s campaign wouldn’t have resonated and been successful if not for Occupy,” he said. “Occupy helped create a mood and understanding in the country of the populist moment that we’re in, where so few have so much at the expense of the rest of us.”
What did Sunrise do for Zuccotti Park?
As a result, Sunrise helped marshal the youth vote in the 2018 midterms to elect a slate of House progressives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would elevate the group’s climate-jobs plan—which came to be known as the Green New Deal—to the top of the Democratic Party platform.
How did Occupy veterans help the Democratic Party?
By reinventing digital electoral politics , Occupy veterans helped put a once-fringe Democratic socialist into the leadership of the Democratic Party, where he was able to move progressive priorities—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, debt-free college, a $15 wage, higher taxes on the wealthy—from the periphery into the mainstream. Sanders would provide the springboard for Ocasio-Cortez and a generation of anti-corporate lawmakers to begin to remake one of America’s two major parties, as social movements shaped electoral outcomes. In the words of Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, “Occupy shifted the political culture of the U.S.,” birthing an era in which “liberals have been radicalized, and radicals have been electoralized.”
How did the Occupy movement impact the labor movement?
The fight against income inequality transformed the labor movement in other ways, as Occupy activists in 2012 began helping organize nationwide Black Friday strikes at Walmart, which eventually led to higher pay for half a million employees at the world’s largest retailer. The uprising spread across the low-wage sector—encompassing striking janitors, airport staff, nurses, domestic workers, hotel workers, hospital employees, construction workers, supermarket clerks, and others—shifting the balance of power between employers and employees. The decade-long wave of worker protests achieved its greatest visibility and impact in 2018, when public-school teachers launched strikes to demand raises—which they won—across a dozen states, including West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and the Carolinas, in what became known as the Red State Revolt.
