Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park, the People's Mic and the 99 Percent

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In the fall of 2011, thousands of protesters held a corner of lower Manhattan for 59 days with no leaders, no police and no amplified sound. The anger behind Occupy Wall Street grew out of the 2008 crash, the TARP bailouts that used public funds to rescue banks whose executives kept their bonuses, and the 2010 Citizens United ruling on corporate political spending. The spark came from Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist magazine whose organizers Kalle Lasn and Micah White promoted a September 17 march with a poster of a ballerina on Wall Street's charging bull. When police fenced off One Chase Manhattan Plaza and Bowling Green, protesters settled on their third choice, Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space that had to stay open 24 hours a day, which kept the NYPD from enforcing normal park curfews.

Inside the camp, the human microphone carried speeches through the crowd in waves, the General Assembly sought full consensus before falling back to a nine-tenths vote, and a progressive stack moved marginalized speakers to the front. More than 70 working groups organized online through a BuddyPress site. The camp also faced theft, sexual assault allegations that led to women-only sleeping tents, and criticism over its demographics and antisemitic signage, while assemblies in New York and Philadelphia voted down a drafted 99% Declaration of demands. Police cleared the park on November 15, 2011, but the network resurfaced as Occupy Sandy, Occupy the SEC and the charity now called Undo Medical Debt.

• Anthropologist David Graeber helped shape the concept that first appeared on an August flyer as we the 99 percent, and a Tumblr page turned it into we are the 99 percent.
• By mid-October there were more than 125 Facebook pages for different Occupy groups, with camps spreading to Boston, London and Tokyo.
• A Brookings Institution study of a 2012 May Day march found more than a third of demonstrators earned over $100,000 a year.
• New York City spent roughly $17 million on police overtime, and later settled for $360,000 over the People's Library destroyed in the raid.
• Occupy the SEC filed a 325-page comment letter to regulators on the Volcker Rule in the Dodd-Frank Act.