Friday, October 14, 2011

Wall Street Protest continue




The anti-Wall Street protesters on Friday plans was to clean up the park they have occupied for the past month were postponed.
Protesters, who had seen the plan to clean the park as a ploy to evict them, celebrated the decision. There were a handful of arrests, but not many disruptions.
Occupy Wall Street said in a statement, estimating that more than 3,000 people had gathered in the park.
Brookfield Office Properties, which manages the publicly accessible park, announced the sudden delay in the cleaning that had been set for early Friday morning.
New York police took at least seven people into custody when several hundred protesters left the park to march south through the financial district and north toward City Hall.
Many protesters feared the cleaning would be an attempt to shut down the movement that has sparked many protests in more than 1,400 U.S. cities. There were plans for global rallies on Saturday in 71 countries, according to Occupy Together and United for Global Change.
Protesters are upset that the billions of dollars in U.S. bank bailouts doled out during the recession allowed banks to resume earning huge profits while average Americans got scant relief from high unemployment and job insecurity.
They also believe the richest 1 percent of Americans do not pay their fair share in taxes.

In hopes of keeping out cleaning crews, protesters spent much of the night tidying the park themselves, using brooms, mops and buckets to clean up the park.
"We clean up after ourselves. It's not like there's rats and roaches running around the park," said Bailey Bryant, 28, an employee at a Manhattan bank who visits the camp after work and on weekends.
Brookfield has said conditions at the park were "unsanitary and unsafe," with no toilets and a shortage of garbage cans. Neighbors complained of lewdness, drug use, harassment and offensive odors from the protesters, Brookfield said.
Occupy Wall Street has portrayed Brookfield as part of the financial community that has cost average Americans job security and savings.
New York City Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said in a statement that Brookfield "believes they can work out an arrangement with the protesters that will ensure the park remains clean, safe, available for public use and that the situation is respectful of residents and businesses downtown..."
In Denver, at least 21 people were arrested on Friday and tents were removed from the Occupy Denver protest after up to 100 demonstrators did not observe a curfew and leave a park by the state capitol.
Hundreds of people have been arrested at rallies in New York, and dozens have been arrested in the past couple of weeks in Boston, Washington, Chicago, Austin and San Francisco

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