Occupy Wall Street began on Sept. 17, 2011 in New York City’s Zucotti Park. The movement is an ongoing series of leaderless, grassroots demonstrations to protest economic inequality in America. Their slogan, “We are the 99%”, refers to the gross wealth of the elite 1% of the population and the rest of the country’s citizens. They are fashioning the movement’s revolutionary tactics after the “Arab Spring,” an uprising against police corruption that began in Tunisia in 2010 and subsequently spread to many other countries. The small group of protesters in New York has grown to thousands in over 70 major cities and 600 smaller communities in the U.S. Over 900 cities worldwide have since followed suit.
The Canadian anti-consumerist activist group, Adbusters Media Foundation, sparked the onset of the protests in mid-July of 2011. Adbusters emailed a mass memo to its magazine staff proposing a peaceful demonstration against corporate greed on Wall Street in New York City.
In an interview with the Vancouver Courier, the magazine’s senior editor said, “[They] basically floated the idea in mid-July into our [email list] and it was spontaneously taken up by all the people of the world, it just kind of snowballed from there.”
The activist Internet group, Anonymous, helped to spread the word, urging their followers to descend on the financial district of New York in peaceful protest. They encouraged citizens to set up camp on Wall Street until corporations were held accountable for their unlawful actions. They claimed that American corporations, mainly the six major banks of the world, had robbed the majority of American citizens of jobs, income, opportunity, and even health, in order to amass more of their personal wealth.
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