It’s a balmy September evening in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. I’m standing near a tall fellow I know only as Mike from Ohio. Our left elbows are touching (in a getting-to-know-you game). We’re asked what our favourite sign was from last year’s Occupy Wall Street protests-slash-encampment. “If money is speech, then debt is censorship,” says Mike, smiling.
The group of about 40 people has gathered to practise tactics for an upcoming demonstration. Early Monday, some of them plan to don corporate camouflage – suits, dresses – and, together with hundreds of other protesters, move as close as they can to the New York Stock Exchange. There they will sit until the police tell them to leave, or they are forcibly removed or arrested.
If you thought Occupy Wall Street had disappeared, think again. After months of internal wrangling and low morale, the campaign is staging a return to the spotlight. Sept. 17 is the first anniversary of the movement that took over a slice of downtown Manhattan for two months, spawned offshoots in cities from Toronto to Hong Kong, and coined its own slogan to direct attention to inequality: “We are the 99 per cent.
Read More: The comeback of Occupy Wall Street - The Globe and Mail
is considered the worst bank in the US financial system.
