Occupy Wall Street: crowds march on NYPD, and the Radiohead concert that wasn't

Gawker's Adrian Chen is liveblogging the afternoon's events at the Occupy Wall Street protest in NYC. Sounds like some of the protest organizers (or an overenthusiastic supporter?) pranked the media about that "Radiohead concert," which is now revealed to have been a hoax—for the lulz? Or for more media attention? There are bigger crowds there now, at any rate. Along with the Wikileaks truck.

• [Eark_the_Bunny]

  They are doing what they can to get attention.  The lame stream media is trying to ignore them just like they ignored the first people protesting the Vietnam war.  I very much hope this remains peaceful but I suspect it will not since they are very powerful interests involved.  POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

• [.. .__.]

  EAT THE RICH.

  • [Guy K]

    Go ahead then: propose your alternative to capitalism…

    • [fritzthefox]

      We don’t need to abolish the free market. We need to restrict the behavior of corporations, banks and campaign finance. Banks should be a service, not parasitical middle men presiding over every financial transaction. Oil prices no longer reflect supply and demand, but the frenetic trading of people who will never once lay a finger on the products they buy and sell. Corporations are not your friend, and are in no way accountable to anyone except a few rich shareholders for their behavior, which is essentially the sociopathic pursuit of wealth. Their officers need to be made legally liable for the actions of their companies, much like the captain of a ship. If it sinks, they should drown, not fly away in a private helicopter. Finally, equal media time should be made available to all official political candidates free of charge. The only reason they need lobbyist money is to buy the media exposure that puts them in office. If it were free, they might focus on issues that matter to the voters, not their corporate donors. 

      • [Guy K]

        My point is that the rich are a symptom of the system, not the cause.

        If you want to fix what’s broken then stamp out commercial lobbying and campaign contributions instead of fluffing around with banking regulations and a 1% witch hunt.

    • [teapot]

      ….sensibly regulated capitalism?
      Wall Street is the wild west of financial markets. Deregulation and greed caused this.

      On topic: I love the idea of the WikiLeaks truck, but can you imagine how insane (from an anonymity viewpoint) it would be to approach them in such a highly monitored environment. Isn’t it basically just a portable billboard? When I first saw it in news coverage I was convinced it was a fiendish ploy by some agency with a three letter acronym.

• [Andrew Singleton]

  I’m not sure what the actual doings are. However it would make sense that the Wikileaks truck is pretty much just a prank at this point.

• [s243a]

  “Frank, on top of everything else, confuses the phenomena of globalized corporate capitalism with “the market,” and consequently confuses reining in the one with reining in the other—when, in fact, globalized corporate capitalism couldn’t exist without the state reining in the market. “…

  [T]he key to reining in markets,” Frank says, is to “confront them from outside” in the same ways as the original Populists.83 And elsewhere: “The logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not ‘choice’ or ‘service’ or universal affluence.”84 But markets are in reality the most important countervailing power against big business. It is only through collusion with the state that coercion and monopoly are possible. Monopoly is a function of lack of competition, which is achieved by erecting barriers to entry—the main thing that states do.”
  http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Thermidor-of-the-Progressives.pdf

• [myke]

  +1 to Guy K,  without fixing the problem that money is the main driver of elections, we will continue to move from a democracy to a plutocracy.