Remember when a bunch of anarchists met in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, to denounce Wall Street’s role in the perpetuation of global inequality and mass impoverishment? Remember when it became Occupy Wall Street, and then Occupy Everywhere Else ? Remember when it, like, ended? Yeah, that.
A piece published Thursday in the New York Times reminded us of the worldwide movement that lasted through the fall of 2011. The Times’ Colin Moynihan detailed his experience on Occupy Wall Street, the Tour, in which guide Michael Pellagatti, who was active in the movement, takes visitors to Occupy ‘s landmark sites like Zuccotti Park and Cipriani Wall Street.
Intended to fight the corporatocratic sham they claim the U.S. democractic process has become, the Occupy movement targeted Wall Street in particular for bringing on “the greatest recession in generations,” the 2008 financial crisis, the official Occupy Wall Street notes.
Occupy Wall Street spread from Lower Manhattan to more than 1,500 cities until even the most stubborn news outlets were covering it.
And then, in what seemed like a Wall Street minute, it was all over.
But, why?
Media outlets declared Occupy Wall Street dead in the water a few months in, but Occupy ‘s Dan Kaplan says this was a case of news manufacturing on the part of the very force the movement seeks to oppose.
That force, Kaplan said in a letter to the media, is “the elite of this country who rely on our existing system to enrich themselves and seize power at the expense of everyone else.”
And according to a Huffington Post article, the power-hungry elite have plenty of minions to do their dirty work.
In 2012, Huff Post was one of many news outlets to divulge the contents of top-secret papers obtained via a Freedom of Information Request by the Partnership for Civil Justice fund. The papers revealed that companies, including banks, who feared a backlash from the Occupy Wall Street protests, “coordinated extensively” with the FBI, in New York as well as Memphis, Anchorage, and other cities, to have the movement closely monitored.
The Huff Post says the Occupy Wall Street protests were labeled “domestic terrorism” in certain parts of the document.
In December of 2012, The Guardian ‘s Naomi Wolf discussed the contents of the document , confirming the FBI, DHS, and police joined forces to ensure “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent.”