This movement is growing. You can try to rationalize who these people are, but you will be wrong. This isn’t about Republican or Democrat. It isn’t about socialism or capitalism. This is about the mood of the country. The people protesting are young and old. They are liberal and conservative. This is about anger raging against the machine. This is the beginning of the end for the old order. They don’t know it yet, but they will be swept away by the mood change in this country. These small protests will morph into something bigger. They are peaceful so far, but someone will do something stupid. A protestor will kill a cop or a cop will kill a protestor and then things will explode. This is a Fourth Turning. Bad shit happens during Fourth Turnings and people die. Don’t think for one moment these protests mean nothing.
Occupy Los Angeles protesters camp for second night at City Hall
Loosely organized by a group called Occupy Los Angeles, several hundred people marched and rallied Sunday, holding signs that blasted corporate influence on government. They used Internet sites to mobilize and get attention.
Photos: Sunday’s protest and parade downtown
Tents and blankets dotted the lawn in front of City Hall on Sunday, as people came and went from the encampment. Some stood on the sidewalk holding signs. Sunday night passing cars periodically honked in a show of support.
“It’s been a very peaceful demonstration,” Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Mitzi Fierro said. “They’re out there exercising their First Amendment right, so we’re going to allow them to continue as long it doesn’t become an unlawful assembly.”
Following a procedure established Saturday night, the protesters were to be moved from the grass on the south lawn of City Hall to the sidewalk at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, and back from the pavement to the lawn at 6 a.m. Monday.
Occupy Boston protesters march through downtown Boston
Suzanne’ Kreiter/The Boston Globe
Protesters with Occupy Boston marched through downtown Boston today.
By Brian R. Ballou and John R. Ellement, Globe Staff
About 100 people are marching through downtown Boston this morning as part of the Occupy Boston protest.
Accompanied by Boston police officers who stopped traffic at key intersections, the protesters first gathered in the city’s Financial District this morning and then marched to the State House where they stood on the steps, chanting slogans and holding signs.
Some of the signs included “capitalism is organized crime” and “where’s my golden parachute?”
Most of the protesters appeared to be in their 20s. As they walked through the streets they called out to passersby.
“We are the 99 percent,” one group would shout.
“So are you,’’ another group shouted in response.
During the walk, a handful of people apparently heading to work, briefly joined the protest. One woman handed to the marchers the cookies she had made for co-workers.
The group, called Occupy Boston , is inspired by Occupy Wall Street, a demonstration entering its third week in Manhattan’s Financial District that led to the arrest of 700 people Saturday on charges of blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. The effort has spread to dozens of communities nationwide, with tens of thousands of people participating.
In Boston, the protests had been building for several days, and on Friday swelled to about 1,000 in Dewey Square. Police arrested 24 people on trespassing charges when they refused to leave the Bank of America building nearby.
The demonstration, largely fueled by social media, is aimed at calling attention to what protesters call the ‘‘bottom 99 percent’’ of America who are hammered by rising costs for education, housing, and health care.
“Occupy Wall Street” protest movement seeks a Philadelphia foothold
Ahuviya Harel wore a Soviet flag Thursday to the first Occupy Philadelphia planning meeting, one of many efforts nationwide aiming to echo New York’s two-week-old Occupy Wall Street protest against the “greed and corruption” of the richest 1 percent of Americans.
Communism is “my ultimate goal, in many years, for this country,” Harel said, glancing down at the flag, because “the rich keep getting richer, and everybody else is just struggling to get by or getting poorer.”
Later, after the meeting of about 200 in the soaring, ornate sanctuary of the Arch Street United Methodist Church, Shawn McMonigle, who overheard Harel’s comment, urged:
“Don’t skew us with that communist dude.”McMonigle and the young men he was standing with outside the church said they were not sure how they would change the economic and political systems, though they agree that socialism and communism had been tried in other countries and were not the answer.
McMonigle, an unemployed Fishtown resident, expressed common ground for his group, which comprised a paralegal student stressed about the debt he is taking on to get a degree and a job, a business consultant who said he had seen firsthand the traps financial companies set for the poor, and a retail manager.
“Whatever is happening in the world is not working for the majority of people,” McMonigle said.
In that, the would-be occupiers of Philadelphia, mostly in their 20s, sounded much like many 60-something businessmen who are terrified of the future and convinced that the “dysfunction of our political system,” in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, has stacked the economy against them.
The Philadelphia group aims to capture the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, which was inspired by Adbusters, a Canadian activist magazine hoping to spark street demonstrations of the kind that toppled Arab regimes in the spring. Protesters began occupying a park near Wall Street in Manhattan’s Financial District on Sept. 17.
Dozens of such groups have since formed across the United States, spurred by anger at the power of giant corporations, frustration at joblessness, and exasperation with politicians who refuse to increase taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans while slashing programs for the poor.
