NEW YORK — The Occupy Wall Street movement has close to $300,000, as well as storage space loaded with donated supplies in lower Manhattan. It stared down city officials to hang on to its makeshift headquarters, showed its muscle Saturday with a big Times Square demonstration and found legions of activists demonstrating in solidarity across the country and around the world.
Could this be the peak for loosely organized protesters, united less by a common cause than by revulsion to what they consider unbridled corporate greed? Or are they just getting started?
There are signs of confidence but also signs of tension among the demonstrators at Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the movement that began a month ago today.
“We’re moving fast, without a hierarchical structure and lots of gears turning,” said Justin Strekal, a college student and political organizer who traveled from Cleveland to New York to help. “. . . Egos are clashing, but this is participatory democracy in a little park.”
Even if the protesters were barred from camping in Zuccotti Park, as the property owner and the city briefly threatened to do last week, the movement would continue, Strekal said. He said activists were working with legal experts to identify alternate sites.
Wall Street protesters are intent on hanging on to the momentum they gained from Saturday’s worldwide demonstrations, which drew hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the U.S. and Europe. They’re filling a cavernous space a block from Wall Street with donated goods to help sustain their occupation of a private park nearby. The space was donated by the United Federation of Teachers.
President Barack Obama referred to the protests at Sunday’s dedication in Washington of a monument for Martin Luther King Jr., saying the civil-rights leader “would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there.”
