US activists decrying corporate greed pledged to march on Wall Street again Wednesday despite the arrests of more than 700 protesters who blocked weekend traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. As the loosely-organized protests entered their third week, some 800 defiant demonstrators maintained a presence in New York’s financial district Sunday, drying out their rain-soaked clothes, eating and organizing two major meetings.
“Arrest one of us and two more appear. We are a legion. For we are many,” said Robert Cammisos, a 49-year-old former construction worker who was briefly detained Saturday during a major demonstration in New York against government-backed banking bailouts and corporate influence in US politics. Police said most of those arrested were issued criminal court summons and citations for disorderly conduct before being released later in the day.
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has overtaken a park near the heart of global finance, where hundreds of mostly young activists hoist banners like “Don’t be shy, join us” and “Hitler’s bankers – Wall Street,” and chant slogans against big business moguls. “A lot of people are back. This is a group that will not go away,” Cammisos said, gesturing at a crowd gathered nearby. Zephyr Teachout, a 39-year-old professor from New York, said she was joining the protesters for the third time this weekend.
“I’m thinking about spending the night. I’ve never done it before. Maybe tonight,” she said. “It’s a free movement, people feel they will engage as they like.” Though she acknowledged that the protest movement was “unlikely” to secure the change it demands to the financial system, she said: “We should try.” Protests have spread to other cities across the country, from Washington and Boston to Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
During Saturday’s impromptu march to Brooklyn, demonstrators filled both the bridge’s pedestrian walkway and the roadway, bringing traffic to a halt and forcing police to shut down the key connection between Manhattan and Brooklyn for several hours. Some of the demonstrators carried hand-drawn placards that read “End the Fed” and “Pepper spray Goldman Sachs” in what police described as a peaceful protest that nevertheless saw hundreds detained for public order offenses.
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement, inspired by pro-democracy Arab Spring movements roiling North Africa and the Middle East, said it planned to hold its next march Wednesday afternoon from City Hall to the financial district. Activists began their campaign by occupying Zuccotti Park, in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, on September 17 and have since held protests outside the New York Stock Exchange and NYPD headquarters.
“We are the majority. We are the 99 percent. And we will no longer be silent,” the movement said in a statement. “We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.” Protesters have added police brutality to their lengthy and still vaguely defined list of grievances after a senior officer used pepper spray against four demonstrators who had already been shut inside a police pen a week ago.
