Wall Street

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Updated: Nov. 3, 2011

In Oakland, Calif., a small group of demonstrators faced off against police following a peaceful march of thousands of protesters.

A roving group of about 100 mostly young men broke from the main group of protesters in a central plaza and roamed through downtown streets spraying graffiti, burning garbage and breaking windows. The police said some in the group briefly occupied a building on 16th Street near the port.

After warning the group to clear the building, which according to local media reports was vacant, officers in riot gear fired tear gas and bean bag rounds shortly after midnight local time. Dozens of protesters “wielding shields” were arrested, the police said; the building was cleared by around 2 a.m.

The spasm of violence early Thursday morning came after thousands of Occupy Oakland protesters had expanded their anti-Wall Street demonstrations on Wednesday, marching through downtown, picketing banks and swarming the port. By early evening, port authorities said maritime operations there were effectively shut down.

The day before, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City, who has defended the free speech rights of protesters while objecting to their message, said that he had become more concerned about how the encampment was affecting life in Lower Manhattan. Background

Occupy Wall Street is a diffuse group of activists who say they stand against corporate greed, social inequality and the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process. On Sept. 17, 2011, the group began a loosely organized protest in New York’s financial district, encamping in , a privately owned park open to the public in Lower Manhattan.

The idea, according to some organizers, was to camp out for weeks or even months to replicate the kind, if not the scale, of that had erupted earlier in 2011 in places as varied as Egypt, Spain and Israel.

On the group’s Web site, Occupywallstreet, they describe themselves as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” The 1 percent refers to the haves: that is, the banks, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry. The 99 percent refers to the have-nots: that is, everyone else. In other words, said a group member: “1 percent of the people have 99 percent of the money.”

Three weeks into the protest, similar demonstrations spread to dozens of other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.

In October, demonstrations in emulation of Occupy Wall Street were held in Europe, Asia and the Americas, drawing crowds in the hundreds and the thousands.

The political impact of the movement was increasingly plain. Democrats offered cautious support and Republicans were generally critical, but both parties seemed to agree that the movement was changing public debate.

While the protesters seem united in feeling that the system is stacked against them, with the rules written to benefit the rich and the connected, they are also just as often angry about issues closer to home, like education and the local environment. Each gathering bubbles up from its own particular city’s stew of circumstances and grievances, and the protesters bring along their pantheons of saints and villains.

A new set of challenges to the Occupy Wall Street movement began to emerge on Oct. 29, namely, winter. In the Northeast, a storm bearing strong winds and wet snow rolled up north. There was concern in the movement that the effort needed to stay warm — for that storm and those to follow — could eventually be a drain on the movement’s intellectual energies; and, of course, on its numbers. The Early Days

Within a week of the initial demonstration, the protest grew. On Sept. 24, police made scores of arrests as hundreds of demonstrators, many of whom had been bivouacked in the financial district as part of the protest, marched north to Union Square without a permit. As darkness fell, large numbers of officers were deployed on streets near the encampment in Zuccotti Park, where hundreds more people had gathered.

Efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: protesters were corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police forcibly arrested some participants; and a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting.

On Oct. 1, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators who marched north from Zuccotti Park and took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action, but protesters said they believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting after hundreds had entered. As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans spread across the country, news media coverage of the spread, too, to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts.

Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Oct. 12 that the protesters would have to leave temporarily starting at 7 a.m. Oct. 14 so that the park could be cleaned. Many called the evacuation order a pretext for shutting down the protests permanently. The cleanup was postponed shortly before it was supposed to begin, averting a feared showdown between the police and demonstrators.

Buoyed by the longevity of the encampment in Manhattan, a wave of protests swept across Asia, the Americas and Europe the following day, with hundreds and in some cases thousands of people expressing discontent with the economic tides in marches, rallies and occasional clashes with the police.

In New York, the police arrested 45 during a raucous rally of thousands of people in and around Times Square.

Other than in Rome, where a largely peaceful protest turned into a riot, the demonstrations across Europe were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Similar scenes unfolded across cities on several continents, including in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; Hong Kong; Toronto; and Los Angeles, where several thousand people marched to City Hall as passing drivers honked their support.

But just as the rallies in New York have represented a variety of messages — signs have been held in opposition to President Obama yards away from signs in support of him — so did the protests contain a grab bag of sentiments, opposing nuclear power, political corruption and the privatization of water. Powerful Unions Lend Support

The protest in New York got reinforcements on Oct. 5, when prominent labor unions — struggling to gain traction on their own — joined forces with the demonstrators. Thousands of union members marched with the protesters from Foley Square to their encampment in Zuccotti Park.

The two movements may be markedly different, but union leaders maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature. Labor leaders said they hoped Occupy Wall Street would serve as a counterweight to the Tea Party and help pressure President Obama and Congress to focus on job creation and other concerns important to unions. The Police Response

The police’s actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism, but that may appear less nimble in dealing with the likes of protesters. In everyday policing situations, the one-two punch of uniformed response usually goes like this: Blue shirts form the first wave, with white shirts following. But those roles seem reversed in the police response to the Wall Street protests.

As the protests lurched into their third week, it was often the white shirts — the commanders atop an army of lesser-ranking officers in dark blue — who laid hands on protesters or initiated arrests. Video recordings of clashes showed white shirts — lieutenants, captains or inspectors — leading underlings into the fray.

And a white shirt is the antagonist in the demonstrations’ defining image thus far: Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna’s dousing of penned-in women with pepper spray on Sept. 24, which seemed to surprise at least one of the blue shirts standing near him.

Police officers, law enforcement analysts and others cited a number of reasons for it. The prevalence of white shirts around Zuccotti Park, the center of the protests, signals how closely the department monitors high-profile events. Strategies are carefully laid out; guidelines for crowd dispersal are rehearsed; arrest teams are assembled. It is all in an effort to choreograph a predictable level of control.

Yet in the pepper-spray episode on Sept. 24, critics say, judgment was lacking.

Deputy Inspector Bologna faces an internal disciplinary charge that could cost him 10 vacation days, the police said on Oct. 19. The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also opened an investigation into the episode, which was captured on video and disseminated on the Internet.

The police said on Oct. 20 that the “cumulative arrest” number since the movement’s start was 942. The Political Response

As the protest entered its fourth week, leading Democratic figures, including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama, were embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment see the movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.

But while some Democrats see the movement as providing a political boost, the party’s alignment with the eclectic mix of protesters makes others nervous. They see the prospect of the protesters’ pushing the party dangerously to the left — just as the Tea Party has often pushed Republicans farther to the right and made for intraparty run-ins.

Mr. Obama spoke sympathetically of the Wall Street protests, saying they reflect “the frustration” that many struggling Americans are feeling. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, sounded similar themes.

It is not at all clear whether the leaders of the amorphous movement actually want the support of the Democratic establishment, given that some of the protesters’ complaints are directed at the Obama administration. Among their grievances, the protesters say they want to see steps taken to ensure that the rich pay a fairer share of their income in taxes, that banks are held accountable for reckless practices and that more attention is paid to finding jobs for the unemployed.

Leading Republicans, meanwhile, grew increasingly critical of the protests. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, called the protesters “a growing mob,” and Herman Cain, a Republican presidential candidate, said the protests are the work of “jealous” anti-capitalists. The Media Take Notice

Coverage of the movement in the first week of October 2011 was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released by the Pew Research Center.

The data confirmed an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly gained speed in September, had entered the nation’s collective consciousness for the first time when President Obama was asked about it at a news conference and when national television news programs were first anchored from the Wall Street protest site.

In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable.

The study showed that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage in early October, often with a heavy dose of positive or negative opinion attached.

Some protesters have assailed news media outlets for scoffing at their leaderless nature and lack of agreed-upon goals, but some have also carefully courted attention from those outlets.

The spike in news media coverage is significant because, among other reasons, it may lend legitimacy to the movement and spur more people to seek out protest information on Facebook and other Web sites.

Getting Specific

A frequent criticism of the protesters has been the absence of specific policy demands. Demonstrators formed the Demands Working Group in early October, hoping to identify specific actions they would formally ask local and federal governments to adopt. But the very nature of Occupy Wall Street made that task difficult, in New York and elsewhere.

In New York, the demands committee held a two-hour open forum Oct. 10, coming up with two major categories: jobs for all and civil rights. The team will continue to meet twice a week to develop a list of specific proposals, which it will then discuss with protesters and eventually take to the General Assembly, a nightly gathering of the hundreds of protesters in the park. A two-thirds majority would have to approve each proposal, and any passionate opponent could call for the entire vote to be delayed.

The General Assembly has already adopted a “Declaration of the of New York City,” which includes a list of grievances against corporations and a call for others to join the group in peaceful assembly. To many protesters, that general statement is enough, and the open democracy of Zuccotti Park is the point of the movement.

Elsewhere, , Occupy D.C. and were among the many groups in the movement slowly formulating demands, though in each city, opposition has arisen from skeptical demonstrators. Confrontation

After weeks of cautiously accepting the teeming round-the-clock protests spawned by the Occupy Wall Street movement, several cities came to the end of their patience and others appeared to be not far behind.

In Oakland, the police filled downtown streets with tear gas late on Oct. 25 to stop throngs of protesters from re-entering a City Hall plaza that had been cleared of their encampment earlier in the day. Those protests, which resulted in more than 100 arrests and at least one life-threatening injury, appeared ready to ignite again the following night, but broke up peacefully after a well-attended rally and an impromptu march to police headquarters. .

In San Francisco, city officials had also seemingly hit their breaking point, warning several hundred protesters that they were in violation of the law by camping at a downtown site after voicing concerns about unhealthy and often squalid conditions in the camp, including garbage, vermin and human waste.

In Atlanta, Mayor Kasim Reed ordered the police to arrest more than 50 protesters early on Oct. 26 and remove their tents from a downtown park after deciding that the situation had become unsafe, despite originally issuing executive orders to let them camp there overnight. .

Similar confrontations could soon come to pass in other cities, including Providence, R.I., where Mayor Angel Taveras has vowed to seek a court order to remove protesters from Burnside Park, which they have occupied since Oct. 15.

For supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose diffuse anger has been a defining and sometimes distracting characteristic, the wounding of an Iraq war veteran in Oakland on Oct. 25 provided a powerful central rallying point.

The veteran, Scott Olsen, 24, was critically injured when he was hit in the head with a projectile thrown or shot by law enforcement officers. Mr. Olsen, who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine, suffered a fractured skull. And while Mr. Olsen’s condition improved, his injury — and the oddity of a Marine who faced enemy fire only to be attacked at home — prompted an outpouring of sympathy, as well as calls for solidarity among the scores of Occupy encampments around the nation.

Since the skirmish, which resulted in more than 100 arrests, several liberal groups — including Amnesty International — have condemned the use of tear gas as well as the actions of Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, who said the measures were justified because protesters threw rocks.

Continuing a week of crackdowns across the country, 26 Occupy Nashville protesters were arrested early Oct. 29, the second such roundup, for trespassing. And for the second night running, a judge dismissed the protesters’ arrest warrants, according to an official for the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

In Denver, protesters faced off with police officers in Civic Center Park. The melee that followed was one of the most intense clashes with the police since the protest groups began gathering in a downtown park more than a month ago. Is It a Crisis? Maybe So, if You're a King

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: November 4, 2011

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — When the Earth was discovered to orbit the sun, it was a world in crisis to those invested in the idea that things revolve around us. At the moment in history when power began to flow from kings to the people, it was a world in crisis if you were sitting in a royal court.

But these were not crises so much as paradigm shifts. They were passages from one system, and total way of seeing, to another. And once the new paradigm came, people got over it and went on with making their lives amid new realities.

And so we must ask about the present worldwide blues: What if all this is not, as we keep calling it, a crisis? What if this is a choppy but unavoidable transition between one paradigm — one coherent ball of ideas, power structures, economic theories, values, behaviors — and another?

This thought has stirred of late in moving back and forth between two very different worlds. The first is the world in self-declared crisis, racked by downgrades and bailouts, foreclosures and protests, by polarization and widening inequity, by anxieties that children will be worse off than parents and the future less glorious than the past.

In many places, this narrative indeed feels frightfully true. On the other hand, one also has the privilege of encountering a diffuse global community of naysayers, who refuse this story of crisis and are busily inventing the paradigm they believe we will inhabit before long.

These builders speak about “the crisis” very differently. They see not the end of things — of capitalism, of the West, of the middle class, of liberty — but rather a turning: a comfortable old rug of understandings pulled out from beneath our feet, without convincing understandings to replace it. So here, to make you feel better, are two aspects, among many, of the new paradigm they are weaving.

The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names and takes many forms. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is the idea of the United States “leading from behind” in Libya rather than fiercely commanding. It is newspapers linking to other newspapers on their Web sites rather than walling everything in. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could.

If you’re stuck in the old paradigm, these developments could seem like a crisis. You might fret that no one is reading encyclopedias anymore. Or that these kids who resist newspapers are so ignorant. Or that your nation used to lead from the front and now lurks in the back. Or that the government should be “creating” jobs but isn’t.

The builders would ask you to step back, because the “who” and “how” of influence have changed, and it may require many of us to adapt to new roles. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, a political science professor at Princeton University and former U.S. State Department official, puts it, the leader must now become a catalyst, the diplomat a connector and the public-relations agent a convener.

Media outlets might rethink themselves as curators of complex reality rather than purveyors of wholly produced scoops — much as the Al Jazeera English program “The Stream” does, inviting viewers and social-media users to help craft its topics and ask questions of its guests, then reading their feedback live on the air.

Embassies might refocus from addressing governments to addressing local people and institutions directly. Americans might learn to appreciate led-from-behind, drone-enhanced, coalitional wars that provide fewer heroic thrills but also cost less in blood and treasure. Citizens might find ways to increase employment without the government’s help, as the new Starbucks initiative, Create Jobs for USA, is asking them to do with $5 donations to fund small-business loans.

A second shift involves the desertion of the traditional divisions between public and private, the collective and the market.

We still live with language and institutions and rules derived from a world in which people are either doing good or doing well, either solving collective problems or merely pursuing a buck. But already in our midst is a parallel universe, with very different rules, that can be called the impact economy.

As publics around the world argue about the 99 percent and the 1, the impact economy is breaking the trade-off, applying the 1 percent’s methods to the 99 percent’s needs.

It encompasses entrepreneurs in the developing world who obsess over making things like heart surgery, cellphone service and insurance vastly cheaper, so as to make them available to billions, not mere millions. It includes public-private partnerships as well as investors like the Omidyar Network that are strangely agnostic between earning financial returns and not — pumping money into businesses and charities alike in pursuit of better societies.

It even includes some of the world’s largest corporations, from PepsiCo to Levi Strauss, which have come to recognize the force they exert on the planet’s people and resources and are engaged in unilateral social policy to improve their net effect.

It involves an emerging global cadre of talent who spend careers bouncing among the social, private and public sectors, applying the methods of each to problems in the others, refusing to accept that one of them holds all truth.

Today this impact economy is especially vital outside the West, where the lines between banker types and Occupy types are these days creatively blurred.

As Erik Hersman, a son of American missionaries to Sudan who now runs a startup incubator in Kenya, says: “Instead of thinking of Africa as a place that needs to be more like us, we should think about how we need to be more like Africa.”