THE ANTI-WALL Street protests moved to the nation’s capital yesterday. President Barack Obama and vice-president Joe Biden commented on the demonstrations for the first time since they started on September 17th.
Hundreds of Americans armed with placards, pamphlets and T-shirts gathered at Freedom Plaza, with the Capitol Building as a distant backdrop, to express their anger over corporate greed, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of the environment and other issues.
They have obtained a US Park Service permit to remain there until Sunday, but amid piles of rucksacks and sleeping bags, many said they intended to stay longer.
“What we are seeing here are the seeds of a worldwide, non-violent revolution. Nobody knows how long it will take,” said Tarak Kauff (70). Mr Kauff, a semi-retired house painter from Woodstock, New York, has been working to organise the Washington protest since last spring.
The Occupy Together website, which seeks to chronicle the protests, says there are now “Occupy” movements in 291 cities in the US and abroad.
Just three blocks away in the White House, Mr Obama offered mild criticism of the banking and finance lobby, which has never forgiven him for referring to them as “fat cats” in a television interview last year. “You’re still seeing some of these that acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down” on abusive practices, he said at a news conference.
On Freedom Plaza, Thomas McGath (23), an unemployed graduate with $40,000 in debts from university, said: “I think the main goal [of the protests] should be reform of the financial sector and overturning the [Supreme Court] Citizens United decision, which has allowed unchecked corporate money into politics.”
Mr Biden appeared more in tune with the protesters. “Let’s be honest with each other. What is the core of that protest?” he asked at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The core is the bargain has been breached with the American people. The American people do not think the system is fair.”
Financial journalist Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, said this week that the US financial system was "a curse".
Mr Biden said banks were part of the problem in the economy. Bank of America was “at a minimum . . . tone deaf” for announcing this week that it would charge $5 monthly for the use of debit cards.
The Washington protesters were mostly middle-aged to elderly. Some, like Mr Kauff, had participated in anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in the 1960s. Old men with long grey hair and beards figured prominently in a veterans’ march around the plaza. At a free concert the first performers were called the Raging Grannies.
Wearing straw hats decked with flowers, the ageing women sang, “This is the day we say ‘no more’/No more bailouts and no more war.”