Tens of thousands went on the march in New York, London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Rome, Sydney and Hong Kong as organisers aimed to "initiate global change" against capitalism and austerity measures.
There were extraordinary scenes in New York where at least 10,000 protesters took their message from the outpost of Zuccotti Park into the heart of the city, thronging into Times Square. ...Guardian
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Judicial embellishing of the falsehood of corporate “rights” has in reality been the tool to grind down democracy of individuals in America. Revitalization of once democratic America can only be had by tearing the judicial fabricators away from their public troughs, canceling their gibberish and demolishing the artificial construct they call corporation as a so-called “person”.
Occupy the Federal courts! ...Commenter, Washington Post
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It’s fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don’t comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to “occupy Wall Street.” ...
Yet my interviews with protesters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park seemed to rhyme with my interviews in Tahrir earlier this year. There’s a parallel sense that the political/economic system is tilted against the 99 percent. Al Gore, who supports the Wall Street protests, described them perfectly as a “primal scream of democracy.”
The frustration in America isn’t so much with inequality in the political and legal worlds, as it was in Arab countries, although those are concerns too. ...Nicholas Kristoff, NYT
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NB: Virtually all major newspapers online either feature or have, somewhere on their "front page," a substantive piece about and photos of the protests world-wide. Not McClatchy. Not today. Nary a mention. As though the protests don't exist.
McClatchy's Washington bureau is a main supplier of national and international news to "middle America."
In 2008, McClatchy's bureau chief in Washington, D.C., John Walcott, was the first recipient of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, awarded by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.[6] In accepting the award, Walcott commented on McClatchy's reporting during the period preceding the Iraq War:
Why, in a nutshell, was our reporting different from so much other reporting? One important reason was that we sought out the dissidents, and we listened to them, instead of serving as stenographers to high-ranking [Bush administration] officials and Iraqi exiles.
McClatchey journalists have also won dozens of Pulitzer prizes over many decades. ...Wikipedia
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Today, this movement went global as there were planned demonstrations in in 951 cities in 82 countries. The protests, which were built partly on the foundation of demonstrations in Spain that began on May 15th, included hundreds of thousands of people worldwide taking part in protests and occupations. Although their causes varied — they ranged from everything from protests against European austerity programs to Japanese nuclear power regimes — their demand had one global aim: to seek justice for the vast majority of the world’s population being left out of the dominant global economic and political systems. ...Think Progress
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Closer to home, some 24 protesters were arrested earlier in the day for "occupying" a Citibank near Washington Square Park—MoveOn.org now says those arrested were inside closing out their bank accounts, which they are legally entitled to do we're pretty sure, when cops locked them in. ...Daily Intel
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The BBC this morning reports that the protests there were not violent but clearly the protesters are in it for the long term.
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...Investors and policy makers, burned by the recent crisis, are all supposed to be acting more prudently and forcefully.
Yet, the moment one examines almost any detail of the global financial system, faith falters once again. Take the uncertainty about the derivatives markets. Morgan Stanley has a face value of $56 trillion in derivatives. That’s really nothing. JPMorgan Chase has more — amounting to the G.D.P. of large countries — a face value of $79 trillion in derivatives. If something goes wrong with just one-tenth of 1 percent of those trades, it’s kablooie. ...The Trade, Pro Publica__
...The protests are neither entirely coordinated nor entirely spontaneous. Their messages are consistent: the creep of austerity and the continued anguish of the global middle class in the developed world after the Great Recession. The motifs are familiar, as well. The Guy Fawkes masks. The 99 Percent signs. In Rome, the protests turned violent, but they were mostly peaceful throughout the world. The Times reports thousands of people marching across several continents, "including in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; Hong Kong; Toronto; Chicago; and Los Angeles, where several thousand people marched to City Hall as passing drivers honked their support." ...Derek Thompson, The Atlantic
