By now most readers of ethecofem have heard of #OccupyWallStreet. The protest is on its 11th day, and protesters have been occupying Wall Street and marching around the city, as well as camping out at Liberty Plaza -- otherwise known as Zuccotti Park -- to engage in a peaceful, non-violent protest of, generally, money in politics, the financial system, and the corruption of politics in America, as well as corporate greed in general. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest for the first few days, until the NYPD, as expected, turned unnecessarily violent toward protesters. The goals are varied and not yet as focused as many are hoping, but I'm of the opinion personally that merely occupying Wall Street is a worthy enough goal, and I'm pretty fed up with the so-called progressives who are whining about how the movement is just a bunch of spoiled hippies.
Many cities across the world are participating in this protest, including Minneapolis. I attended a meetup this afternoon with some other folks in the city who are interested in starting our own protest here. It was a fairly well-attended meetup, especially considering how last-minute the planning for it was. There were probably at least twenty of us gathered in a park in Minneapolis, just brainstorming and going over logistics, with a goal to meet again later in the week to finalize the details before the occupation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis begins on October 7th. Why the Fed, and not the Capitol building in St. Paul? That's what everyone's been asking, but there are a lot of benefits to having this begin at the Fed: Minneapolis has city-wide wifi, which will help the live stream we've got planned; Minneapolis is a bigger city than St. Paul; no one likes St. Paul. Okay, that last reason is purely my own, but the point is essentially that the Federal Reserve's policies are obviously part of the huge problem we're facing, and Minneapolis is quite simply just better equipped to handle such a protest that has the potential to be pretty big.
I've got a lot of work to do now, doing things like begging my friends who work in local media to say some stuff about us, so please, if you're in the area, tell your friends about the planned protest on October 7th, beginning at 9:00am. If you're not from the area, please check to see if your city or town has a protest planned, as well, and consider helping in any way that you can. You can find a list of Twitter handles for current protests across the Unites States here. For more information about the upcoming OccupyMN, please go to the website where all of the relevant information will be posted as soon as it's acquired, at OccupyMN.org.
