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| Occupy Wall Street participants gather to stage a May Day demonstration march at Bryant Park in New York yesterday |
Occupy Wall Street protesters took to New York’s streets yesterday in the highlight of a plan to mount a “general strike” across the US.
Small groups of protesters held simultaneous demonstrations outside a string of Manhattan corporate institutions including the Time-Life building and McGraw Hill publishers in the Rockefeller Center neighbourhood.
Others were targeting Bank of America and HSBC branches, others Disney and The New York Times. “Prosecute the fraud” and “Jobs now,” read two protest placards.
Protests appeared to be peaceful and AFP reporters witnessed only five arrests during early events. This was in contrast to previous Occupy marches that have typically ended in scuffles with the police and mass arrests on minor charges.
However, the disruption and potential for conflict was expected to heat up later in the day when activists staged a march through lower Manhattan to the Wall Street area.
Activists say they are protesting against corporate greed and the plight of ordinary people in an anemic economy and housing market. “Hey, hey, BOA, who did you foreclose today?” protesters chanted at a Bank of America office building.
“The movement started in part because of frustrations over the bailouts and how the government handled the economic collapse of 2009,” protester John Dennehy, 29, said.
“The feeling within Occupy Wall Street is that people that created the collapse, namely bankers, were helped out, and the people affected by it like homeowners who got foreclosed upon... weren’t helped.”
Similar protests were announced across dozens of US localities and in countries ranging from Spain to Australia.
“While American corporate media has focused on yet another stale election between Wall Street-financed candidates, Occupy has been organising something extraordinary: the first truly nationwide General Strike in US history,” the OWS movement said on its website occupywallst.org.
The day of action comes against the background of a rancorous presidential election campaign, but also tests the Occupy movement’s ability to regain its flagging influence.
OWS appeared in New York for the first time last September, with activists taking over a square near Wall Street to protest against government bank bailouts, corporate salaries, and what they said was a hopeless economic landscape for ordinary people.
However, after police across America ejected OWS protesters from public squares two months later, the movement struggled to stay in the limelight and to back up its claim to represent the mainstream public, or the so-called 99%.
In San Francisco, Occupy members cancelled a protest on the famed Golden Gate Bridge, an important transport link, but were targeting ferry services.
In Los Angeles, demonstrators were planning a co-ordinated “slow, city-paralysing, carnival-esque descent into the center of the city.” Four separate groups of cars and bicycles were planning to converge from different directions to “light society’s ills,” the LA website said.
In Seattle, Occupy announced large-scale plans “to halt the flow of capital, reclaim a tool of resistance, and unify movements against exploitation, repression, and corruption.”
The “general strike” would target “exploitation, repression, and corruption,” according to the statement.