Posts
Illustration: The Square.
Note: the #OWS is the hash tag for twitter re occupy wall street.
The protests during the 60s were against the Viet Nam war. Many of those demonstrating had voted for the “Peace Candidate,” LBJ in 1964. He promptly made the war full-fledged.
This time around, another candidate espoused exactly what the people hoped for. The candidate, Barack Obama, was replaced by the President, Barack Obama. The situations are the same.
One striking difference, however, is that the unions have joined in. The last time around, the unions even attacked the demonstrators. Today they are with the demonstrators. What happened was that a series of mainly Republican politicians, bought by major corporations, waged war against them, just as they waged war against all the rest of the 99% of the people. Thus the police, on the whole, support them as well as do the marines.
They managed to lower wages, first, so that people could not buy their stuff. Well, the next step was to make loans to people to buy their stuff. After that, people were unable to pay off their loans, so they were simply impoverished.
An interesting note is that the only union to support Ronald Reagen during his election was the Air-Traffic Controllers. That was the one he destroyed first. Moral: whomever you vote for will screw you, unless the other guy wins. Then he will screw you.
Well, some accounts from the 6th of this month follow:
AMY GOODMAN: Ana Tijoux, "Shock", just got this week from Chile. It’s about the student protests there, inspired in part by, The Shock Doctrine, the book by our next guest, Naomi Klein. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Among the thousands at last night’s Occupy Wall Street protests here in New York was award-winning journalist and author, Naomi Klein. She’s the author of the bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She also wrote, No Logo, a book that has become a cultural manifesto for critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. Tonight she will be speaking at the Occupied Wall Street encampment. She traveled from Canada to participate in the protest.
AMY GOODMAN: Last month Naomi was in Washington, D.C. where arrested along with more than 1200 other people in a two-week campaign of civil disobedience outside the White House against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries. We’re going to talk about that in a minute, but, Naomi, you came here to New York to occupy Wall Street, so, tell us about what you found.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s just been extraordinary. I just want to say, just off the top, what a great show this has been. You guys, clearly, were up all night, or your producers were, cutting that amazing collection of the video and voices. But, what struck me most is just how hard some in the corporate media must be working in order to find inarticulate voices, because there are just so many articulate voices in the protest. I mean, everybody who you stop and talk to can really give a sermon about what is wrong with this economy and have all kinds of solutions.
AMY GOODMAN: A union activist came up to me yesterday at the rally in Foley Square and he said, "I mean, how do get out our message? The media will not talk to us." I said, "I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet." And he said, "Well what?" I said, "Go buy a little red clown nose. Go up to a reporter and go, beep beep, beep beep, and they’ll interview you."
NAOMI KLEIN: No, it really is a sick cultural ritual of, every time there is a new generation of politicized engaged young people who come forward, there is this ritual mocking of them; a kind of a hazing, and it’s such a corrupt and corrupting way to welcome a new generation into politics, and of course coming from a media culture that has worked so hard to dumb down this society. So, it’s just enormously ironic when they are mocking these very, very well-informed, educated...
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we don’t have to take this from you, Naomi. Let’s turn to the networks themselves, to former CNBC reporter Erin Burnett, who covered, some would way, mocked the movement in the new segment on her first day of her new CNN show on Monday night. The show is called, Out Front. In this segment it was titled, "Seriously?!" This is a clip.
ERIN BERNETT: Now for a story that made us say, "Seriously?!" The Occupy Wall Street protest entered its third week, today. What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters. And it’s spread to other cities. But, what are they protesting? Nobody seems to know. So, this afternoon we went to Wall Street to find out, and despite what you heard, here is what I saw. It’s not just dancing hippies protesting. This is an unemployed software developer, Dan.
ERIN BERNETT: What do you do for a living?
DAN: I’m a software developer.
ERIN BERNETT: Software developer.
DAN: Yes.
ERIN BERNETT: So, currently employed or unemployed?
DAN: Unemployed.
ERIN BERNETT: Unemployed.
DAN: Fun-employed, we like to call it.
ERIN BERNETT: Fun-employed.
DAN: It’s called Occupy Wall Street.
ERIN BERNETT: So, do you know that taxpayers actually made money on the Wall Street bailout?
DAN: I was not aware of that.
ERIN BERNETT: They did. Not on GM, but they did on the Wall Street part of the bailout.
DAN: OK.
ERIN BERNETT: Does that make you feel any differently?
DAN: Well, I would have to do more research about it, but, possibly.
ERIN BERNETT: If I were right? It might?
DAN: Oh, sure.
ERIN BERNETT: Seriously? That’s all it would take to put an end to the unrest. Well, as promised, we did go double check the numbers on the bank bailout and this is what we found; yes, the bank bailouts made money for American taxpayers right now to the tune of $10 billion, anticipated that it will be $20 billion. Those are seriously the numbers.
AMY GOODMAN: That is the new CNN host, Erin Burnett, after going down to Occupy Wall Street encampment. Her first night of her new show, Out Front, Naomi Klein.NAOMI KLEIN: I think that tells us a lot about what we can expect from that show. Her sarcasm and snideness so striking because she is one of dozens of main-stream financial reporters that cheerled the housing bubble, and every bubble before it, completely missed every sign coming, that the economy was about to crash. So, I don’t think she’s in much of a position to be so snide. But, of course, I don’t think that that is why people are protesting—-because they think they lost money on the bailout. It’s the very nature of the bailout, it’s the very nature of the banks being able to get billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers, with absolutely no strings attached, and that homeowners were sacrificed, that workers—-
JUAN GONZALEZ: That the several million people who’ve lost their homes would definitely cheer the profit that was made on the bailout, right?
NAOMI KLEIN: Exactly. It was the decision to bail out the banks with no strings attached and not to bail out workers, and not about homeowners, and now to pass the bill for the crisis that was created on Main Street, the crushing of the global economy, to the public sphere, and now having the cost of that crisis passed down at the federal level, at the municipal level, and taking the forms of all the cutbacks that all the union spokespeople were talking about; the health care workers, the education workers. These are the people paying the cost for their crisis. The slogan, "We won’t pay for your crisis," started in Italy two years ago and it spread to Greece and it spread to France and it’s really been globalized. That, to me, is—-that and we are the 99%—-is really what’s bringing people to the street. It’s inequality, but, more than the inequality, the injustice of the most vulnerable people having to pay the cost of the crisis for the rich. And, of course, she completely misunderstood the source of that rage, misrepresented it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, earlier this week, CNBC spoke with William Gross, the co-founder of PIMCO, one of the largest global investment firms, with $1.3 trillion under management. Gross manages the world’s largest mutual fund, with almost a quarter of $1 trillion invested. Let’s go to that clip.
BRIAN SULLIVAN: You warn about how labor is not to participating in wealth creation and that is a macro global threat.
WILLIAM GROSS: Yeah, I think so. That’s certainly the most immediate problem, globalization. Policy-makers may be killing their golden goose, in this case, the American worker, whose household income at $49,000, Brian, is the lowest in more than a decade. And to the extent that jobs go to China and overseas as opposed to stay in the United States, then that affects employment, it affects levels for unemployment, and it affects economic growth going forward. Without consumer, without the wage earner, you have very little in terms of the potential for consumer growth and for economic growth going forward.
BRIAN SULLIVAN: As Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff pointed out in their book, This Time is Different, they know that over history, financial crises become banking crisis become political crises. We’re seeing the riots of the protest in Greece, we’re seeing Occupy Wall Street here. Is this going to turn into more of a political crises, whereby the people sort of march up, rise up, if you will, and these austerity programs are forced to go on the back burner, thus dis-enabling a country like Greece to pay its bills?
WILLIAM GROSS: I don’t think we’re going that far in the United States. To some extent, the movement, so to speak, that we see in Greece in terms of the strikes and protests, simply hasn’t gravitated over here, and I do not suspect they will. We’re always fascinated by the debates and by the policy differences, so to speak, but, to a considerable extent, policies are much the same, in terms of favoring capital as opposed to labor. And until we begin to have that sense in terms of the mainstream public, that it’s labor that needs to be favored in terms of policy, then I don’t think we’re going to see much of a protest, per se.
AMY GOODMAN: That was William Gross, the co-founder of PIMCO, one of the largest global investment firms, with $1.3 trillion under management, speaking on CNBC. Naomi Klein?NAOMI KLEIN: It’s really interesting analysis, and I think there’s a lot of truth in it. This is one of the contradictions of capitalism, is that it is so destructive that it destroys its own base, whether that’s its base of consumers able to buy its own products, which is why you have to feed them cheap credit, which then becomes a bubble that pops and destroys the economy, or whether it’s the destruction of the ecosphere, I mean, whether it’s the destruction of the natural systems on which we depend. And this is why I think we need the economic and ecological crisis as absolutely intertwined, if not the same crisis, that has their roots in unfettered greed and an inability to say, enough, and an inability to understand that there are limits; that there is such a thing as scarcity in the natural world. And this is one of the things—-there is such a thing as a limit in what our atmosphere can absorb in terms of the pollution that we put out.
Our understanding of limits is so twisted, because we don’t understand those limits. We don’t understand the real limits imposed on us by physics and chemistry, but we impose these absolutely false limits, when it comes to economics. This is one of the themes that really struck me talking to demonstrators yesterday at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, was the theme of false scarcity, that we are living in this age were everybody is told there’s not enough. There’s not enough money for people to have decent health care. There’s not enough money for people to have decent housing. There’s not enough space in the country for immigrants because there’s not enough. We’re told this all the time. We live with this, and that’s what is so powerful and so symbolic about the decision to go to Wall Street, to go to this space of abundance and expose the lie of scarcity. But, at the same time as we expose that lie of scarcity, and to show yet, no, actually this is an abundant society, we have a crisis of distribution in this society, we also have to recognize where there are real limits. The limits of our natural systems to absorb the tremendous stresses that we’re putting on them, and climate change is only one part of those stresses.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Naomi, speaking of not enough, there’s the argument, also, that the country doesn’t have enough energy, and, what, you were arrested in the protest against the XL pipeline. Unfortunately, some of the construction unions are lobbying for that now because they see it as jobs, as part of the solution to unemployment.
NAOMI KLEIN: Marching in Labor Day parades arm in arm with TransCanada, the company that is pushing the pipeline, I think a low point in labor history.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the XL pipeline.
NAOMI KLEIN: But some great unions are supporting the protests, including the Transit Workers Union.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And I’m Juan Gonzalez. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world. Labor unions and students joined a growing Occupy Wall Street movement on Wednesday in the largest march since the protest began 20 days ago here in New York City. Tens of thousands marched from Foley Square to Liberty Plaza, the site of the protest encampment where hundreds have been sleeping since a timber 17th. The march was peaceful, but police later beat a handful of protesters with batons after they toppled a police barricade in an attempt to march down Wall Street. Police say a total of 28 people were arrested on Wednesday. Meanwhile, smaller protests against Wall Street continue to take part across the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Early this morning, police raided the occupy San Francisco encampment less than a day after some 1000 protesters marched to the city’s financial district. In Boston, protesters have entered their seventh day occupying of Dewey Square and the city’s financial district. In St. Louis, police arrested 10 people on Wednesday. In Washington State, 26 Occupy Seattle protesters were arrested after police moved into a public park where protesters have been camped out for five days. Video shot in Seattle shows police entering a tent and arresting the activists inside.
POLICE OFFICER: You better get up.
PROTESTER: Let go of me... be wonderful. Let go of me... be wonderful. Let go of me... be wonderful. You’re hurting him. You’re hurting him. [Unintelligible]
POLICE OFFICER: Bring her off the to the side. Have her brought off to the side...
AMY GOODMAN: Back here in New York, Democracy Now! was reporting last night from Liberty Plaza, the site of the Occupied Wall Street encampment, when we got word that police were beating and pepper spraying protesters on Wall Street. On our way to the scene we ran across a woman being arrested.AMY GOODMAN: What happened? What happened?
WOMAN: I was standing on a sidewalk. It’s illegal apparently, so be careful on the sidewalk guys.
VOICE FROM CROWD: Is that all you were doing, just standing there?
WOMAN: Yes.
VOICE FROM CROWD: What did they—-why did they grab you?
WOMAN: They said it was unlawful assembly, but I was the only one on the corner. So, I don’t know.
VOICE FROM CROWD: What’s your name?
WOMAN: Troy Davis
AMY GOODMAN: Troy Davis?
WOMAN: Troy Davis, Emmet Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King.
AMY GOODMAN: Minutes later we arrived at the intersection where the police had beaten protesters on Wall Street.[Inaudible]
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll go back to that tape in a minute, but voices of eyewitnesses to last night’s altercation between police... let’s go back to that video of the arrests.AMY GOODMAN: We’re standing on the corner of Wall and Broadway. Some people are shouting, "Who are you protecting?" There are police on horseback behind us. There’s the smell of pepper spray in the air. Just a little while ago, a group of people tried to come on to Wall Street and a number of people were arrested and pepper sprayed.
LUKE RUDOWSKI: My name is Luke Rudowski from We Are Change, but I was covering the whole thing in the middle. The police just went crazy with pepper spray, with batons, started beating everybody. I was there filming it as press, just holding my camera up like this and then the police officer came, I got some pepper spray thrown at me. One police officer, I have video of this, it’s going to be uploaded on our YouTube channel right now, took his baton sideways and just rammed me right in the stomach and then threw me on the floor. And I’m just there as a journalist. I kept telling him I’m a journalist, and they just threw everybody on the floor and kicked everybody out.
DAVID SUKER: People were just trying to walk down Wall street, and we started marching forward and the police held us at the barricades, and then, suddenly, one of their officers jumped into the crowd and started beating people and spraying pepper spraying people.
[Shouting, screaming]
DAVID SUKER: The deputy inspector started swinging wildly at us, hitting people. I got hit on my back. Many other people got hit.
PROTESTER: Upon trying to enter, the police officers brought out their clubs and their mace and sprayed at least five or six people and were... continue out there, like Luke Skywalker out there with their clubs. Billing in circles. Got a good number of people; probably about 20 or 30 arrests.
HERO VINCENT: I just got 1000 people just to stand with us in solidarity, because what’s going on right here is wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. People should not have been pepper sprayed in the face, should not have been slammed to the ground. We did absolutely nothing wrong. We came peacefully, and it’s gone on long enough. We just want peace. We just want change. That is all we want, and I’m tired of seeing it. I’m tired of seeing this abuse. They do not run this country. This is our country, and I’m tired of it. I am tired of it. This can’t happen no more.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices of eyewitnesses to last night’s police crackdown on the protesters at Wall Street.JUAN GONZALEZ: Earlier in the day, tens of thousands of people marched from Foley Square to the side of the Occupy Wall Street encampment. It was the largest rally since the protest began 20 days ago.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. UNION LEADER: Wall Street, can you see?
CROWD: Wall Street, can you see?
UNION LEADER: We want a fair economy.
CROWD: We want a fair economy.
UNION LEADER: Ain’t no use in looking down...
CROWD: Ain’t no use in looking down...
UNION LEADER: Cause the union is around.
CROWD: Cause the union is around.
ANNOUNCER: Bob Masters, Chair of the WSP and Political Director of the CWA.
BOB MASTERS: Occupy Wall Street captured the spirit of our time. This is the spirit of our time. This is Madison. This is Cairo. This is Tunisia. You can’t see it, brothers and sisters, but back up the street they are still streaming in. We’re here to say, no more to the bailouts of Wall Street and the disasters on Main Street. No more to tax cuts for the rich and no jobs for the rest of us. We need to turn our energy, take this spirit, and take this state and this country back. And we are going to do it. Occupy Wall Street has started a movement that we are all part of around the world. And together, we will win. Together, we will win.
ANNOUNCER: George Gresham, 1199, United Healthcare Workers East.
GEORGE GRESHAM: We need bailouts with jobs. We need bailouts with health care. We need bailouts in education. We need to know that our future generation will have a place in this country, not subservient to those who have more than they will ever need in this country.
ANNOUNCER: Now we have Karen Higgins. She is the President of National Nurses.
KAREN HIGGINS: As the result of Wall Street’s greed, health-care services, now needed more than ever, are harder and harder to obtain. Insurance premiums are skyrocketing again. Vital health programs, cut backs on the so-called budget problems, while that money sits on Wall Street. We’re talking about our children, our elderly. We’re talking about people delaying cancer treatments and screening. We’re talking about our elderly not taking their medications. The list can go on and on. Today, we’re telling you as nurses, we can fix that. Our caring extends beyond the bedside. We say, tax Wall Street and use the money for jobs, schools, and health care.
ANNOUNCER: Chris Shelton, CWA.
CHRIS SHELTON: We’re here because of corporate greed. Everyone one of us is here because of corporate greed. Everyone of us is here there’s signs in the audience that say, we are the 99%. Well, we are the 99%, and it is time that the 1% made the sacrifice that they’ve been telling us we have to make.
ANNOUNCER: Héctor Figueroa, local 32BJ.
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Brothers and sisters, we are the ones who do the work in the City of New York and everywhere. We tend to the elderly, we take care of our children, we’re the ones who make the buildings safe and secure, but we are under attack. And we are the students. We are the community organizers. We are the people fighting for immigration reform, and we are under attack.
ANNOUNCER: From Occupy Wall Street, David Suker.
DAVID SUKER: From the veterans of the U.S. Army and the whole military, thank you Occupy Wall Street and thank you New York. And we should do like Greece is doing today, shut the country down.
ANNOUNCER: Lillian Roberts, Executive Director of DC 37.
LILLIAN ROBERTS: I am just full with joy that we’ve found each other. We’ve been fighting our fight, you’ve been fighting your fight, and we’ve come together and that’s a hell of a force to deal with. Now, my union represents 125,000 municipal employees. 1000 titles and they are the lowest paid people in this city. And there’s a threat to lay off 700 of them, and more and more and more, and we’ve had enough of it.
JOHN SAMERSON: I’m John Samerson. Brothers and sisters, I want to thank the folks from the Occupy Wall Street movement for sparking the labor movement and showing us—-showing us the way to do it. The way to do it is not to have conversations with politicians in the corridors of Albany and the corridors of Washington, D.C., it’s to take it to the streets. And thank you for showing us how to do it. We’re here standing with you and we’re going to move, right now, we’re going to march on Wall Street right and we’re going to occupy Wall Street, right now.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Union leaders addressing tens of thousands of members and supporters of the Occupy Wall Street march on Foley Square, yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll continue with our coverage after this break, but, this break brought to buy Rebel Diaz in the streets of New York.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, students also made up a large contingent of Wednesday’s march in support of Occupy Wall Street. A national day of student walkouts was held to protest budget cuts and to show support for those there at Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street. According to a website, occupycolleges.org, walk-outs occurred at 75 schools across the nation including many in New York City. Democracy Now! met up with several students who walked out of classes at the City University of New York, the New School and New York University to attend Wednesday’s protest.
PROTESTERS: Students and workers, take the city back. Students and workers, take the city back.
CONER TOMAS REED: My name is Coner Tomas Reed and I’m a student here The Graduate Center and I teach writing composition at Baruch College at CUNY. Students have historically been a tremendous catalyst. When the Student Non-violent coordinating committee had really taken up of the charge of leading the desegregation lunch counter campaigns, people talked about these lunch counter sit-ins spreading like a fever. The same thing happened here today. There was a coalition of CUNY and SUNY students who initially called the walkout for today to be a state walk out October 5th and this has totally ballooned. There are now students from dozens of campuses who are latching on and similarly it is spreading like a fever. I think that a lot of students are in the direct lines of seeing on this economic crisis is selling people a really terrible bill of goods. People got the impression that are able to go school and then have a well paying job afterwards, some semblance of security, some semblance of inclusion in a professional, responsible life. What’s happening is that we’ve seen a lot with students across the sea in Europe and students in Puerto Rico and in Chile is that this is really a mirage.
MALENI ROMERO: My name is Maleni Romero. I think this is part of what is going on throughout Europe and also in South America. People are fed up with what is going on. Political parties are not providing and not showing the voice of the people, but they are mainly looking for the benefit of the bigger corporations. So, I think what I was doing, in explaining what I would like to do here, you know, try to find new ways of building a better society.
PROTESTERS: Students and workers, take the city back. Students and workers, take the city back.
SPARKLE VERONICA TAYLOR: Sparkle Veronica Taylor and I am actually with the New School for General Studies. We’re out here to protest against the government and we’re marching from Wall Street to Wall Street Occupied. I have no job. I just went on an interview earlier today and God willing, I will get the job. They say they’ll call me, and you know how that goes. For the past year, I’ve been a professional flier distributor, which is maybe a notch above consultant. So, yeah, this is how I have been making my money, piecemeal as a freelance flier distributor. As far as student debt is concerned, the more debt that we accrue and are still not able to get jobs after we graduate, does not make any sense, does it? How are we even going to be able to pay back that debt if we do not have jobs?
PROTESTERS: Banks got bailed out, we got sold out. Banks got bailed out, we got sold out. Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.
BRANDON OWENS: My name is Brandon Owens and I am out here because I’m a broke student and I think it’s crazy how much school costs. I think it’s crazy that 99% of the population isn’t in control of their own wealth and that 1% of the population has a majority of the money and it is not being fairly distributed. I’m $50,000 in debt from two years of school with no idea how I will pay that money back when I graduate and that’s unfortunate. I have to pay all this money just to get a good job with no certainty of that.
PROTESTERS: The people, united, will never be defeated. The people, united, will never be defeated.
TEJ NAGARAJA: I am Tej Nagaraja and I am a student at New York University. NYU students are mobilizing today to support Occupy Wall Street and it’s an especially important day with the community mobilization were people have been doing long-term labor organizing, housing organizing, racial justice organizing in communities in all five boroughs of New York City are turning out to support Occupy Wall Street, so we can really bring national attention and really get a fire going in our broader movement, while we take leadership from and support people were doing long term organizing in the workplaces and in their communities, so we can really win larger victories for justice based on the leadership of these struggles that have been going on since before 2008 and needs to really go forward to get us out of this current rut and toward a broader victory.
[Music]
AMY GOODMAN: Voices of the students who joined with the tens of thousands in Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, surrounded by the courts as union leaders gave their speeches of people marched from the square to Liberty Plaza, where the encampment called, Occupy Wall Street, has been for the last three weeks.AMY GOODMAN: We’re standing in the march from the union rally to the Occupy Wall Street encampment. We’re somewhere along Broadway, thousands, where tens of thousands of people are marching. What is your name?
ROBIN KAPLAN: My name is Robin Kaplan.
AMY GOODMAN: And here are you from?
ROBIN KAPLAN: Originally, I’m from Canada but I’ve been in the States for two years now.
AMY GOODMAN: What you think of the media coverage of this?
ROBIN KAPLAN: I think the media coverage is focused on the incoherency of the message. My thought on this is that the American people have been asleep for the last 35 years. This is them finally figuring out how to collectively organize, how to more together as one. As time progresses, people will become organized and start forming different factions and having more singular demands.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the sign you are holding say?
ROBIN KAPLAN: My sign says that we are approaching $1 trillion in student debt. We have a reported rate of 9.1% unemployment, which is pretty false as it is and that is a huge problem.
PROTESTERS: Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like. Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. 
Yet $30 billion in military aid to Israel remains untouched, a budgetary "sacred cow." 
This project and this movement is about mobilizing the masses and nothing is more important than numbers when it comes to a protest’s strength and longevity. That is why we are providing everyone with free downloadable posters, graciously provided by graphic designers around the country, to not only promote this site and efforts down on Wall St. but to help mobilize in other communities, to inspire, to promote, to inform, and to strengthen the occupiers’ efforts. Please, feel free to 
