More than 1,000 people blocked the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway Avenue in the heart of New York City’s Financial District for hours yesterday to protest corporations and the institutions that are profiting from the climate crisis. Their message was clear: capitalism = climate chaos.
The Associated Press reports, “Over 100 people, including a person wearing a white polar bear suit, were arrested Monday night after they refused to leave Broadway near Wall Street, police said. Most of the arrests were for disorderly conduct.”
“Participants encountered barricades and a heavy police presence as they tried to stream onto Wall Street, home to the New York Stock Exchange, after several hours of demonstrating by the bull statue nearby. Some tried to push through the barricades, and police and protesters tussled as officers held the barriers in place, using pepper spray. …The barricades stayed. So did hundreds of demonstrators, who continued sitting and standing outside the barriers, on Broadway.”
“Peppered with elements of performance art — one person wore a polar-bear suit, another Grim Reaper-like robes and a gas mask — the protest encompassed Occupy Wall Street veterans, anti-war activists who see climate change as a still bigger cause and residents of areas battered by Superstorm Sandy. …Activists chanted such messages as ‘we can’t take this climate heat; we’ve got to shut down Wall Street’ and bounced huge balloons meant to represent carbon dioxide bubbles.”
Politico adds, “The ‘flood Wall Street’ event was meant to invoke memories of Hurricane Sandy, the massive storm that flooded parts of Lower Manhattan in late 2012, and which the protesters call an example of the worsening disasters that are coming if the world continues on its warming path.”
And the New York Times notes, “The participants had begun marching late Monday morning from Battery Park to Wall Street to protest the role they say investments in companies with practices that damage the environment play in encouraging climate change. Streaming out of the park, protesters made a sharp turn onto Broadway, and marched north between idling buses and trucks, chanting, ‘The people are rising, no more compromising’. They stopped just north of Bowling Green, blocking Broadway up to Morris Street. There, they sat down, unfurled a huge banner denouncing capitalism and held a series of meetings as marching bands played. …Many of the demonstrators dressed in blue to symbolize a wave of water — water that could engulf the low-lying streets near the New York Stock Exchange, as the storm surge from the East River and New York Harbor did during Hurricane Sandy.”
The Council of Canadians supported Flood Wall Street with a modest donation and political support.
The protest came one day after the 400,000-person strong People’s Climate March in New York City and on the eve of key United Nations talks to spur governmental action in the lead up to the UN climate summits in Peru this December and the critical UN climate summit in Paris in late-2015.
For more on the protest, please see #FloodWallStreet on Twitter and floodwallstreet.net.
Photo by John Paul Keeler.
