Occupy Wall Street to Celebrate First Anniversary With 'Carnival of Resistance'

4:02 AM PDT 9/17/2012 by Georg Szalai

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Shirley Halperin

The protest movement against economic inequality, which drew much media attention in its early days and support from some in the entertainment industry, is looking to revive its momentum.

Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement against economic inequality, plans to celebrate its one-year anniversary Monday with what it is calling a "roving carnival of resistance," Bloomberg News reported.

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The movement, which says that the wealthiest 1 percent do well at the expense of the rest of the population, drew much media attention in its early days, but it has been much more quiet around it in recent months.

"Occupy Wall Street won’t stop until the 99 percent gets what it deserves - economic justice," Bloomberg quoted organizers as saying. It said organizers are looking to revive the momentum the movement had a year ago.

The Monday events in New York City include gatherings of "non-violent civil disobedience" starting at 7am local time near the New York Stock Exchange and marches around downtown Manhattan as night falls, it said.

Protest marches and similar events are also planned in at least 15 other U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Asheville, NC, and Hilo, Hawaii, according to the report.

Kanye West and Russell Simmons last fall were among those celebrities who visited the protests to show their support.

The Occupy movement also drew much attention from news shows, the likes of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report and even inspired a casting ad for MTV's Real World.

And more recently, Hollywood observers hotly debated Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises and its messages due to plot lines and settings that were mindful of the Occupy movement.

Also last fall, a dozen news organizations lodged complaints about the New York Police Department's treatment of journalists covering the Occupy movement when police cleared out downtown Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, which had been the center of protests. Journalists were kept at a distance and some arrested.

The Occupy movement’s New York City General Assembly, which made decisions by consensus, stopped working earlier this year amid infighting and low turnout, Bloomberg said.

Occupy Wall Street’s last major public protest was organized on May 1 in Manhattan, Seattle and San Francisco.

Email: Georg.Szalai@thr.com

Twitter: @georgszalai