The big surprise was how many people showed up. I was suspecting hundreds but there were clearly thousands, enough to fill the steps and square of the U.S. Custom's House and spill over into Bowling Green Park. My friend tells me that people kept coming in waves throughout the day and thinks that it's another example of how social media has changed these events. People show up who hadn't even planned to be there but get texted by their friends.
The crowd was mostly young but hard to pin down. I'd say it was equal parts college kids, traveller kids, people from out of town who had come in for the event and the rest of us crusty older folks from one political sect or another. The presence of so many LaRouche movement people was disconcerting to me. There was also quite a few Ron Paul supporters.
I went to the Open Economic Forum which got off to a rocky start with two LaRouche speakers. The first, Diane Sare, was comprehensible enough. She's running a campaign for office in New Jersey that is working on a bill to reinstate the original Glass-Steagall Act that was gutted under Clinton. The second LaRouche movement speaker began his speech with "the pagan cult origins of the British empire" and I took off for a while until the next speakers showed up.
A usual suspect from the International Action Center set up his portable mike and speaker right next to the open forum and started spouting the party line. When I asked him to move to another place since the forum had been planned earlier he not only obliged but generously offered his mike and speaker to the forum speakers. I never thought it would happen but I am now BEST FRIENDS FOREVER with one particularly infamous member of the IAC. You know who you are, Mr. Nice Guy.
David Graeber gave an artful talk about debt which I'm not going to do justice to by describing. He talked about the linkages between paper money and war. How most debt has historically began as paper or bonds issued to finance war. He also spoke about the national and institutional interest in maintaining debt. And how debt in our era has been "Democratized"... passed off from national and institutional holders onto working people through credit cards and mortgages and student loans.
At the same time the open economic forum was going on a much larger open forum was occurring on the steps of the US Custom House. A megaphone was passed around to anyone who wanted to speak.
I had to leave early but my friend tells me that at around 4pm the crowd turned into a march up to Wall Street. Only a part of the street was accessible and the area around the Stock Exchange had been barricaded by the police. The crowd did not try to break through the barriers and instead made its way back to Zuccotti Park where they set up their encampments for the night.
Zuccotti Park is a private and not public park and my friend believes that either the organizers or the NYPD have brokered a temporary deal to allow the demonstrators to stay there for tonight and tomorrow. I'd expect that the NYPD will begin to seriously crack down on the encampment either later Sunday night or early Monday morning. If the encampment can survive past that then that opens up a whole new vista.
fm