One year later: Occupy in disarray but spirit lives on

People gather in Washington Square Park in New York on September 15, 2012 during an Occupy Wall Street (OWS) One Year Anniversary Convergence Weekend. The special all-day Occupy Town Square with OWS tables, performances, and teach-ins. OWS is the name given to a protest movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district. AFP PHOTO / TIMOTHY A. CLARY (Photo credit should read TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GettyImages) / TIMOTHY A. CLARY

(AP) NEW YORK - Occupy Wall Street began to disintegrate in rapid fashion last winter, when the weekly meetings in New York City devolved into a spectacle of fistfights and vicious arguments.

Punches were thrown and objects were hurled at moderators' heads. Protesters accused each other of being patriarchal and racist and domineering. Nobody could agree on anything and nobody was in charge. The moderators went on strike and refused to show up, followed in quick succession by the people who kept the meeting minutes. And then the meetings stopped altogether.

In the city where the movement was born, Occupy was falling apart.

"We weren't talking about real things at that point," says Pete Dutro, a tattoo artist who used to manage Occupy's finances but became disillusioned by the infighting and walked away months ago. "We were talking about each other."

The trouble with Occupy Wall Street, a year after it bloomed in a granite park in lower Manhattan and spread across the globe, is that nobody really knows what it is anymore. To say whether Occupy was a success or a failure depends upon how you define it.

Activists associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement participate in a general assembly in Washington Square Park, Sept. 15, 2012 in New York. The Occupy Wall Street movement will mark its first anniversary on Monday.

/ AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Occupy is a network. Occupy is a metaphor. Occupy is still alive. Occupy is dead. Occupy is the spirit of revolution, a lost cause, a dream deferred.

"I would say that Occupy today is a brand that represents movements for social and economic justice," says Jason Amadi, a 28-year-old protester who now lives in Philadelphia. "And that many people are using this brand for the quest of bettering this world."

On Monday, protesters will converge near the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate Occupy's anniversary, marking the day they began camping out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan's financial district. Marches and rallies in more than 30 cities around the world will commemorate the day.

About 300 people observing the anniversary marched Saturday, and at least a dozen were arrested, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct, police said.

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But the movement is now a shadow of its mighty infancy, when a group of young people harnessed the power of a disillusioned nation and took to the streets chanting about corporate greed and inequality.

Back then it was a rallying cry, a force to be reckoned with. But as the encampments were broken up and protesters lost a gathering place, Occupy in turn lost its ability to organize.

The movement had grown too large too quickly. Without leaders or specific demands, what started as a protest against income inequality turned into an amorphous protest against everything wrong with the world.

"We were there to occupy Wall Street," Dutro says. "Not to talk about every social ill that we have."

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[hypnotoad72]

Most initiatives for change to fizzle out after a while...

I mean, the TEA Party didn't last a year...

[FP1970]

Why don't they go and occupy the foreign embassies and consulates of countries like Mexico, China, India and Pakistan that lobby relentlessly to keep the immigration pipeline open? The stupid occupiers should know by now that immigration, both legal and illegal is seriously hurting American workers in all job categories. Why are they ignoring this vital issue? In fact, why is Barack Obama ignoring how much immigration is hurting American workers of all races?

[ccrider27]

Occupy is by not means over or 'in disarray.' it's just that the corporate media would like for them to go away.

They're not going anywhere.

Thousands of them were on Wall Street this weekend.

Check it out live:
http://www.nationofchange.org/live-stream-wall-street-occupation-1316970901

[sjc_1]

The U.S. economy crashes every 8-10 years in recession for the last 100 years and we go back to the same thing hoping it will be better...I think we all know the definition of that by now.

We need a managed economy that works for everyone, not a patchwork of laws over the decades that are seldom enforced fairly, if they are enforced at all.

We can plan an economy that works, with NO recessions, it is in our power to do so, we must or we will go back to the same mess that got us here.

[mjvwsr]

"We need a managed economy"

You mean Central Planning....like the USSR?

[sjc_1]

We have a Constitution that describes government, we need a description for the economy we want. This is a democratic economy, one that the majority agrees on.

[nomostew]

Occupy simply shows that the left has its radical wackos, too. Small numbers of them camp, mostly harmlessly, in parks. Their equivalents on the right run their party, crashed the economy, undermined the recovery, and hope to do it all over again.

[nohater]

bottom line, it did nothing, it changed nothing. looking back it was just silly. it never had a true leader or a platform of any kind. it was just a mob of people that would gather from time to time in a mini riot. it had no goals, no doctrine, nothing.

[Jaylah54200]

Oh, puleeze, "Occupy Wall Street" was an abysmal failure.

First of all, Wall Street only operates under the laws Washington places upon them. If OUR representatives in Washington tossed out all of the investment/banking regulations, "Occupy" needed to be occupying the Capitol in Washington. Not Wall Street.

Second, did the folks in Tahir Square have meetings all the time? Were they soliciting funds to buy vegan pizzas to be made available to those in the square? Or did they just know that the Egyptian government wasn't working anymore, and refused to go home until things changed?

Third, when the Egyptian government told the people in Tahir Square to go home, did they? It's become such a universal truth that the first person to say, "When the pain outweighs the pleasure, you'll change" has been lost to history. But it's true.

Apparently, the pain still doesn't outweigh the pleasure for enough Americans.

[tepeterso]

The Occupy movement in its core values and yes it had them- suffered from two flaws. First and symbolically it got caught up in the symbolism of tryng to be another Arab Spring and literally occupy public space. A difficult symbol to maintain more than a short time. After all this is not Tahir Square. Secondly, and more importantly, wanting to be inclusive they did not recognize that not everyone who marched with them shared the core values-for example Ron Paul Libertarianism did not represent those values; radical anarchists did not represent the values of the "99%"-this played into the critque that they could not settle on a specific articulation of their beliefs and account for becoming embroiled in factional disputes. But what they did do was identify the problem which is the core values that the institutions of society no longer served the people but a plutocratic elite. In time hopefully there are those who can articulate the cause which they embodied. They will realize that to empower people one must become political which will require them to dismiss their naive ideals for soemthing that can effect change. The ideas are not dead so we still need to wait and see what mnight happen.

[anonymous010]

Occupy successfully identified a serious problem in this country (the fact that wealth distribution is becoming even more unequal than ever despite the fact that middle class Americans are working as hard as ever) and successfully gave it a voice, but they failed in virtually every other aspect as a movement. They should have defined a clear goal and determined leadership from the start. After that, they should have proposed what they wanted to do about it. Had they done that, they might still be here today.

Without leadership and a clear goal, probably at least half of the people who showed up to their rallies and meetings were possibly upset about different things entirely. Some didn't care one way or the other, and just showed up to protest because they wanted to be a rebel. If you want a successful movement, you have to keep that kind of rabble out.

Without some kind of solution to achieve the goal, they proved that they were no more useful than anybody else - we all recognize that this country has problems, and we can partially agree on what they are. What we need are people who know how to fix those problems, or who can at least offer a solution that hasn't been tried before (this is where the current political parties BOTH fail).

America is currently on a see-saw depending on which party is in charge. When the Democrats are in charge, our policies swing to the left. When the Republicans are in charge, our policies swing to the right. Whenever either party takes over after the other is voted out for whatever reason, they typically work to undo what the last party did. Astonishingly, neither party seems to realize (or care) that this has all been done before, over and over. The only difference is the ups and downs are becoming more extreme - we're either swinging more conservative or more liberal - and that's not a stable situation.

We need to stop working against each other and start trying to solve problems together. Otherwise this country is doomed to fall apart very soon. We need to vote out any politician who puts political gains over the nation's best interests, whether we agree with his or her stances or not.

[rwsmith29456]

Any ideas behind the occupy movement has been from the start, incoherent, at best.