Occupy Wall Street Movement

Occupy Wall Street

Since the beginning of the 1900’s the world has seen more and more social movements being led by young people, who protest against the worlds inequalities. These movements range from the civil rights movement, to the hippie movement in the late 60’s to more “modern” movements. One of those movements is the Occupy Wall Street movement or OWS for short. From October 2011 onward, OWS was not only the largest protest movement in North America but also sparked worldwide protest that either used the Occupy name or embodied the OWS ideology in some way. This essay will first talk about the origin of OWS, its ideology and goals and will then move on to talk about the ripple effect it had on the rest of the world. It will conclude

The registration of the domain occupywallst.org followed shortly after on July 14th, 2011 and starting August 2nd, a weekly general assembly was held were people met to plan the occupation of Wall Street. An important aspect of these general assemblies is that people met without the intent of building a hierarchy. Everyone was equal and everyones opinion was weighted equally. Not only did supporters of the movement attend these general assemblies but supporters of a group named “ New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts” were also partially involved in these meetings. Prior to the inception of OWS this group had already carried out a three week long occupation called Bloombergville. The movement began with a call to occupy Zuccotti Park with tents on September 17,

This changed when it came to several confrontations starting September 24th. On September 24th a group of protestors was headed towards Union Square and was blocking several streets along the way, which led to the arrest of around 80 protestors. Although this is understandable, it was what happened while these arrests were made that caused media attention to skyrocket. During the arrests, police was indiscriminately using pepper spray in situation where the use of pepper spray was unnecessary or on already detained protestors. Most of it was caught on video and led to the increased interest of the media and the general public. It could be argued that this event marked the beginning of more “hostile” relations between police and protestors but it would definitely not mark the end. In the following weeks police would be more and more aggressive towards OWS members and even conduct big scale operations to clear the tents city in Zucotti Park; One of them being the night of November 15th. The police said the reason for this was the unhygienic conditions protestors had to live in and due to several criminal offenses committed by protestors living the camps. According to protestors, police pushed away camera crews from journalists, used tear gas and destroyed protestor’s personal property. Protestors