‘We showed it was possible to create a movement from almost nothing’: Occupy Wall Street 10 years on

Some say it inspired BLM and the growth of the US left. Others see it as an abject failure. A decade after the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, the people who were there look back

“We are the 99%.” Ten years ago that unifying slogan travelled around the world. Some attribute its origin to the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who first popularised the distinction between the 1% of people with great wealth and power and the rest of us. Others say that it was the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber who coined the phrase. But everyone agrees that it went global when it was voiced by demonstrators who gathered in lower Manhattan’s financial district on 17 September 2011.

What took place that day, and the two months to follow, would become known as Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality and injustice that spread to 28 other US cities, to European capitals and financial centres, including London, Paris and Berlin, as well as parts of South America and the far east. In total it’s said that there were more than 750 Occupy events around the world, featuring demonstrators ranging from a few tens in some places to many thousands in others.

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We’re on the verge of breakdown: a data scientist’s take on Trump and Biden

Peter Turchin, an entomologist-turned-historian, offers insight into the battle between elites

Peter Turchin is not the first entomologist to cross over to human behaviour: during a lecture in 1975, famed biologist E O Wilson had a pitcher of water tipped on him for extrapolating the study of ant social structures to our own.

It’s a reaction that Turchin, an expert-on-pine-beetles-turned-data-scientist and modeller, has yet to experience. But his studies at the University of Connecticut into how human societies evolve have lately gained wider currency; in particular, an analysis that interprets worsening social unrest in the 2020s as an intra-elite battle for wealth and status.

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Kavanaugh Casualties

The hearing confirmed that the traditional JFK/Hubert Humphrey Democrat party, as once envisioned by a Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, or Jim Webb, is long kaput. In its place is being birthed a hard-left progressive movement that absorbs the ideologies and methodologies of its base and that now incorporates all sorts, from Ocasio-Cortez's socialist hipsters to Black Lives Matters, Antifa, and Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Ap Photos: a history of civil disobedience in America

In this Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015 file photo, William Smith Jr., right, and his partner James Yates, second right, speak with an unnamed clerk in an attempt to obtain a marriage license at the Rowan County Courthouse in Morehead, Ky. The couple were denied a marriage license despite the ruling of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding an earlier decision instructing the clerks to issue mariage licenses.

After mass turnout, can protests turn into political impact?

Deb Szeman, a self-described "homebody," had never participated in a demonstration before hopping on an overnight bus from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend the women's march on Washington. She returned on another bus that pulled in at 4 a.m. Sunday, full of people buzzing about what might come next and quipping that they would see each other at the next march.

The Latest: About a dozen gather in Zuccotti Park

The Latest on the commemoration of the grassroots Occupy Wall Street movement, which started five years ago at New York City's Zuccotti Park : About a dozen people have gathered in Zuccotti Park, the one-time encampment of the Occupy Wall Street grassroots movement known for its refrain "We are the 99 percent." Three people are holding a large banner that reads "Occupy Wall Street."