Organizers said the events marked a springtime resurgence of Occupy Wall Street, and they punctuated their message with trombones, hand-held drums, a San Francisco kayak flotilla and a crowd a half-mile long moving down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Calls for a global general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping were heard in Toronto, Barcelona,London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney.
In Oakland, California, police used gas to end a confrontation with demonstrators. In New York, a crowd of thousands gathered at Union Square in anticipation of marches on Wall Street and police said they made about 30 disorderly conduct arrests by 6 p.m.
“What we’ve seen here is a really impressive collaboration between Occupy Wall Street, labor, immigrants rights groups and others -- showing that alliances people thought weren’t possible, are,” said Marjorie Dove Kent, 31, a Brooklyn resident who marched to Lower Manhattan from Union Square with a group called Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.
Storm’s Center
Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity and high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have arisen in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
In New York, the city whose Wall Street is synonymous with a financial system protesters said discredited itself in the 2008 crash, the Occupy movement has relied on demonstrations and marches since Nov. 15. That was the day that police ousted hundreds of protesters from their headquarters in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, where they had camped for months.
Organizers described the May Day events as a coming together, with activists also calling for more open immigration laws, expanded labor rights and cheaper financing for higher education. Financial institutions remain primary targets.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011. That’s equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, compared with 43 percent in 2006, according to the Federal Reserve.
Waltzing for Justice
At JPMorgan Chase’s building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, about 40 protesters waltzed to a 12-piece band featuring trumpets, flutes, trombones, drums and an alto saxophone.
Thousands made their way down Fifth Avenue from Bryant Park to Union Square, including the squadron of strummers singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” At Union Square, they met guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, a rock band with radical politics.
“Some people have the freedom to choose, and they chose to buy a Lamborghini, while others are choosing which Dumpster to pick their dinner from,” Morello said in an interview.
The crowd in the three-block-square park was shoulder to shoulder at 5 p.m. local time. Organizers said as many as 20,000 were present; there was no official count.
About 6:30 p.m., columns of marchers headed toward Wall Street. Police herded them through closed intersections as onlookers poked their heads from apartment windows.
There was to be an 8 p.m. “radical after-party” in the Financial District.
New Alignment
Gustavo Maria Giugale, a banking lawyer visiting New York on business from Buenos Aires, said he sympathized with the protesters as he watched them assemble in midtown Manhattan.
“The interests of capital and employees must merge,” Giugale said as he sipped espresso at a cafe, dressed in pinstriped suit, Hermes tie and Burberry coat. “It’s a matter of striking the right balance.”
Occupy-related events were planned in 115 cities throughout the U.S., from college towns such as Amherst, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia.
In Chicago, about 1,000 protesters escorted by police cruisers and helicopters and a dozen mounted officers marched two miles into downtown.
Alesh Musial, 36, who runs a trucking company, came to speak out against corporate campaign contributions.
“I cannot believe that someone can give a candidate a million dollars and then not have his decisions affected by that,” Musial said.
Broken Glass
In Seattle, a group of about five people in black broke ranks with an Occupy march and broke windows in three storefronts and half a dozen cars as they threw flares.
“These protesters are under the umbrella of anarchists, but what do they really stand for?” said Michael Aycock, 43, who watched from across the street as protesters spray-painted and broke glass. “There are plenty of jobs out there, but these people are not interested. It’s the age of entitlement.”
In Oakland, about 400 gathered downtown about 2:30 p.m. About two hours earlier, police sent tear gas through a crowd that had surrounded and thrown objects at them, and refused to disperse, City Administrator Karen Boyd said in an e-mail.
There were four arrests, and vandalism at Bank of America and Bank of the West, she said. Protesters broke windows of a police van and punctured tires of a news vehicle, Boyd said.
Across the bay in San Francisco, morning ferry service was canceled due to labor demonstrations, said Mary Currie, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.
As 65 workers picketed the waterside Ferry Building, accompanied by a seven-piece band and a juggler, Occupy protesters in eight kayaks approached, chanting “We are the 99 percent!” and displaying flags reading “99%,” “Health Care!” and “Dignity.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Goldman in New York athgoldman@bloomberg.net; Pham-Duy Nguyen in Seattle at pnguyen@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman atsmerelman@bloomberg.net
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