If you were hanging out on Twitter over the weekend, you may have seen the hashtags #TakeWallStreet or #Occupywallstreet pop up in your feed. Did that mean that friends were encouraging you to take the J line all the way to Chambers for some reason? That we should all go back to school and get our MFAs in business/finance, like our mothers have been collectively telling us to for years now?
Luckily for us its neither: Just that Internet group Anonymous — they of the “Standing outside Scientoligists’ houses and yelling” brigade — which organized a “Day of Rage” on Saturday against all the fat cats on Wall Street. Adbusters is also involved. Now the thousands of protests have apparently settled in to their new downtown surroundings, according to the group’s official website, with a takeover of Zuccotti Park. (They’re renaming it Liberty Plaza again, FYI.)
Why now? Shouldn’t have these protests come before Goldman Sachs and Too Big to Fail? According to three people interviewed by The Guardian, they were at the protest because it’s just really time to do something about all those financial types, you know?
“CEOs, the biggest corporations, and the wealthy are taking too much from our country and I think it’s time for us to take back,” said one activist who joined the protests last Saturday. Jason Ahmadi, who travelled in from Oakland, California explained that “a lot of us feel there is a large crisis in our economy and a lot of it is caused by the folks who do business here”. Bill Steyerd, a Vietnam veteran from Queens, said “it’s a worthy cause because people on Wall Street are blood-sucking warmongers”.
Where were you guys with the masks a couple years ago? Having the protests this close to 9/11 just seems like a not-so-great-way to get the city’s attention to your cause, you know? Oh, Mayor Bloomberg may have predicted this by comparing our use of social networking to that of Cairo and Madrid. Which means that any second now, Martial Law will officially go into effect (Homeland Security has already put out a warning) and take down the cell-phone reception south of Broadway?
Unfortunately that would screw over the bankers probably more than the post-collegiate protestors who are assembling as we speak to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and generally chill out together in this currently relaxed mob vibe.
