Why are there protests on wall street

No one can even agree, nearly a decade later, who started the rumor. Just seven weeks later, police cleared the park and the protest ended. In the short term, the movement appeared to have failed. But today, Occupy Wall Street no longer looks like such a failure. It animated the rise of Sen. It was also a training ground for some of the most effective organizers on the left today.

I spoke with more than three dozen people — former members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, journalists who covered it, and people who are currently active in socialism and on the left — about how Occupy Wall Street shaped the world we live in. The tents in the park are gone, but many elements of Occupy have proven to be an enduring success. More anarchist than socialist, Occupy Wall Street was a nominally leaderless movement that refused to lay out specific demands. The hacker group Anonymous helped spread the message via blogs, Twitter, and YouTube.

Organizers held general assemblies in the weeks leading up to the occupation itself. The concept of the 99 percent vs. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, for example, had explored it in a piece for Vanity Fair earlier that year. Ultimately, it distilled a precise way of talking about the message of Occupy and spoke to the effects of inequality so many people were feeling.

The image it provoked was an evocative one: It pitted the very upper echelons and wealth and power against the masses, and it set up a framework for thinking about how the political economy works.

The rallying cry allowed Occupy to be much bigger than the protests themselves. The initial demand that Adbusters ad suggested was the creation of a presidential commission to end the influence of money over representatives in Washington, DC, but that was quickly abandoned, and while organizers debated on what their demands should be, they never landed on a consensus. The demands working group, I was told by multiple people, was one of the most hated groups at Occupy.

Gazette during the encampment and now executive editor at the Appeal. None of that happened. Occupy Wall Street, at least in its physical manifestation, came to an end in the early hours of November 15, , when police raided Zuccotti Park. In the days and weeks to come, some protesters would linger, and Occupiers would take their activities elsewhere.

But by and large, the movement was viewed as over — and as a failure. New York City fast-food workers walked off the job in protest for higher wages a year after the first Occupy protests. It was orchestrated by a number of community and civil rights groups, including New York Communities for Change, a community coalition and an early public backer of Occupy.

Fight for 15 claims that it has won raises for 22 million people. It is now a mainstream position for many Democrats. Occupy has also played a part in pushing forward the conversation around student debt.

In , the Enterprise became the first space shuttle to At the White House in Washington, D. The accords were Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. George Washington prepares a final draft of his presidential farewell address on September 17, Less than a year later, on July 23, , Williams gave up her crown after nude photos of her surfaced.

Despite the scandal, Williams later launched a successful Live TV. The camps may be gone and Occupy may no longer be visible on the streets, but the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is still there, and growing. What appeared to be a passing phenomenon of protest now looks like the future of U. In , numerous cities and states including four Republican-dominated ones—Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska, and South Dakota—voted for higher pay; will see more showdowns in New York City and Washington, D.

The grassroots movement composed of fast-food workers and Walmart employees, convenience-store clerks, and adjunct teachers seized on the energy of Occupy to spark a rebirth of the U. This renaissance was most recently visible on April 15, when tens of thousands of workers marched in hundreds of cities to demand better pay and conditions.

We have an entire world to win. Occupy also reshaped the U. As people gravitated to Occupy encampments, teach-ins, and demonstrations across the country, that energy easily transferred into the fight against climate change. In , before they were war-zones, Yemen, Libya, and Syria had nonviolent protests against intransigent regimes. The regimes struck back brutally. These nightmares began with outbreaks of hope.

That hope was intolerable. Millions of people have been displaced, and hundreds of thousands killed, as a result. In Europe, protesters did what many U. Protest-aligned parties took national power in Greece and Spain. But the central European banks clung harder to austerity policies that put housing and decent work out of reach for a generation of young people. When the politics of providing for people who had been deprived became untenable, right-wing movements arose to blame the symptoms of austerity policies on refugees arriving from the Syrian crackdown.

In the United States, well, we eventually got President Trump, the inconvenienced owner of the building at 40 Wall Street. I recall the drugstore on its bottom floor being a popular escape route from police. Protesters everywhere tried out radical forms of self-governance in their camps, inspired by the texture of online networks. Rather than making demands of politicians, they debated how to make politicians obsolete.

Whatever ideology any individual held, together they were anarchists, in the sense of trying to root out hierarchy wherever it appeared. When celebrities visited Occupy Wall Street to offer support, debates broke out about whether they should be allowed to speak or have any special treatment. There was a time when the open-source website for the Occupy Wall Street assembly was a beautiful machine, publishing up-to-the-minute news and discussion and proposals — a glimpse of politics moving with the speed and interactivity of the internet.

Before long in Egypt — and perhaps now Tunisia — the democratic revolution turned into a new dictatorship.