President Barack Obama embraced the Wall Street protesters Thursday after dozens were arrested the day before in the largest demonstration to date that drew thousands of participants and had the support of major union groups.Obama said during a press conference at the White House that the three-week-old protests that have spread around the country “expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.”
“We had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage throughout the country, all across Main Street, and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place,” he said.
Obama said the demonstrators’ anger is “going to express itself politically in 2012 and beyond until people feel like, once again, they’re getting back to some old-fashioned values.”
On Wednesday, New York City police announced that 28 people were arrested during a march through Lower Manhattan, significantly fewer than the more than 700 protesters arrested during a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday.
The protesters gathered in Manhattan’s Foley Square before beginning their march to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the movement’s unofficial headquarters just blocks from Wall Street. Along the route, demonstrators chanted — “We are the 99 percent!” “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!” and “Banks got bailed out, We got sold out!”
The Associated Press estimated that about 2,000 people took part, while ABC News pegged the number at several thousand. The Twitter feed for the protest, @OccupyWallStNYC, wrote that 15,000 people were massed in Foley Square.
Attention coalesced around an incident in which a New York Police Department officer was wielding his baton. A video posted to YouTube shows the officer swinging the baton with two hands amid protesters, but it is unclear whether any were struck.
There were also multiple reports of police using pepper spray. According to the New York Daily News, police used pepper spray after about 200 protesters tried to “storm barricades” blocking Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange.
Members of the New York State United Teachers, Service Employees International Union and Transport Workers Union also took part in the march, and several other major unions have publicly thrown their support behind the protests.
“Teachers and public employees represent the other ‘99 percent’; they are not in the 1 percent,” NYSUT spokesman Carl Korn told Mother Jones on Tuesday, referring to the 99 percent slogan and organization that believes 1 percent of the country is controlling the nation’s wealth and prospering. “We’re supportive of that overarching message.”
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has personally endorsed the protests and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa released a statement on Wednesday announcing it is the latest union to back the movement.
And ex-Sen. Russ Feingold told The Washington Post that he endorses the movement, making the Wisconsin Democrat one of the most prominent liberal supporters of Occupy Wall Street.
“This is like the Tea Party — only it’s real,” Feingold said on Tuesday. “By the time this is over, it will make the tea party look like … a tea party.”
A number of top House Democrats, including Reps. John Larson, Louise Slaughter, Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison, are also jumping aboard the movement and praising the Wall Street demonstrators, POLITICO reported on Wednesday.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was not nearly as sympathetic. “It’s ridiculous,” Bloomberg was overheard saying about the Occupy Wall Street protests at a Vanity Fair cocktail party on Tuesday, reports the New York Post. Bloomberg had previously said that the protesters were blaming “the wrong people.”
Occupy Wall Street has exploded across the country, and organizers also called for students at college campuses to leave class in protest Wednesday at 2 p.m. And MoveOn.org is holding a “virtual march” on its website, asking people to post pictures of themselves with the movement’s slogan, “I’m the 99 percent.”
Over the weekend, 700 demonstrators were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct at the Brooklyn Bridge. There are concerns that Wednesday’s large-scale protest could lead to more arrests or other acts of violence.
The weeks of demonstrations could cost the New York Police Department hundreds of thousands of dollars, Councilman Peter Vallone told New York public radio station WNYC.
“We’re going to spend hundreds of thousands, maybe even $1 million on this that we don’t have. Because of these protests, we might even wind up shutting down schools and firehouses because this is costing a lot of money,” Vallone said.
The NYPD would not say how much the demonstrations have cost the department.
Origin
Source: Politico
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