Bloomberg Business Week - 9/18/13, Drake Bennett
Occupy Wall Street protesters marching from United Nations headquarters to New York's Bryant Park on Sept. 17
Tuesday marked the two-year anniversary of the official birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement. On Sept. 17, 2011, a small band of activists took over Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and made it their own, until Mayor Michael Bloomberg (founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which publishes this magazine) cleared them out two raucous months later. In contrast to the thousands who packed the park in 2011, Tuesday’’s anniversary at Zuccotti Park was small—around 100 people showed up. There were scattered gatherings elsewhere. It was tempting to conclude that the movement is well and truly defunct—something people were already saying on its first birthday). In a conversation last month, one of the movement’s earliest organizers, David Graeber, told me he was “taking a little time off” from the movement.
In light of Occupy’s ostensible demise, what are we to make of the events of the past week and a half? In New York, Bill de Blasio, echoing Occupy’s themes of income inequality, fat cat impunity, and police overreach, trounced the more centrist Christine Quinn and Bill Thompson in the Democratic primary for mayor. Liberal Democrats in the Senate helped to torpedo the candidacy of Larry Summers for chairman of the Federal Reserve after Summers was tagged, fairly or not, as too friendly to Wall Street. Similar concerns helped drive Bill Daley, President Obama’s former chief of staff and himself a former investment banker, to drop out of the Illinois Democratic gubernatorial primary, despite the deep unpopularity of the incumbent, Pat Quinn.
More: BusinessWeek.com
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