Bringing down the wall: Occupy Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge arrests.

I'm in New York, reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests. This was my first report for the New Statesman; you can also find my coverage at The Independent.

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The big bronze bull is surrounded by metal fences and strategically placed members of NYPD's finest. The famous statue, the symbol of aggressive market optimism, is normally open for tourists to grope and fondle, but today, in part because of the "Occupy Wall Street" protest, it has been penned. Today, the Wall Street Bull looks amusingly like a panicked animal in a cage.

It might have been spooked by the couple of thousand activists, hippies, union members, laid-off workers and schoolkids camped out around the corner in Liberty Plaza. When I arrive at Occupy Wall Street, they've already been there for a fortnight, and have turned the square, which is normally scattered with City workers snatching lunch and chattering on their smartphones, into a little peace village, complete with a well-stocked library, free kitchen, professional childcare centre, sleeping areas, meeting spaces, and crowds of young people dancing and playing music.

The protest, which began on 17 September after a call-out by activist magazine Adbusters and the hacker collective Anonymous, has swelled from its original few hundred members after a weekend of police crackdowns. Images of New York police pepper-spraying young women in the face and arresting peaceful protesters spread around the world, which has been shocked not so much by the response of the police in a city where the term 'police brutality' was coined, but by the fact that here, in America, at the symbolic heart of global capitalism, ordinary people have turned off their televisions and come out to shout in the streets. "I never thought I'd live to see this in New York City," says my friend, a native New Yorker, as we watch a drum circle forming underneath the looming skyscrapers of Manhattan's financial district, speckled with rain.

Right now, as I write from the occupied Plaza, a mass arrest is taking place on Brooklyn Bridge, where 2,500 activists have marched to express their distaste for corporate greed. 'Banks got bailed out - we got sold out!' chanted the marchers, hesitantly at first, and then more confidently, keeping to the sidewalks, before they were led onto the car portion of the bridge by police - who promptly sealed the exits and began to arrest everybody.

The entrance to the Bridge is now completely sealed by a quadruple line of cops, as reports come in that a journalist from the New York Times has been arrested. Marchers on the other side yell angrily at the police to let their friends go. "Come join us!" they shout. "You are the ninety-nine percent!"

They mean that the police, like the protesters, are part of the "99 per cent' of the population whose livelihoods are threatened by the financial crisis, as opposed to the 1% of wealthy Americans still raking in profit. "We are the 99 percent," says the group on its Tumblr site. "We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent." It's a very polite way of saying 'class war.'

The '99 percent' statistic has become emblematic of the American wing of what is phrasing itself as a global protest movement, taking its inspiration from square occupations in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Great Britain. Another statistic you can see daubed on placards around the Plaza is that the wealthiest 400 Americans have more combined wealth than the poorest 150 million. Later in the day, the United Steelworkers union becomes the latest in a growing list of labour organisations and non-profit groups to throw its support behind Occupy Wall Street, ahead of a united march next Wednesday.

Economic inequality is a consistent undertone, but at times this occupation has the feel of a music festival; drifting through the square are young people who seem to have walked out of a wormhole from Woodstock, including a boy with dreads and tiedye scarves sitting on a skateboard next to a sign asking for 'donations for adopting puppies.'

I ask him what the puppies are for. 'Emotional support,' he tells me. Elsewhere, a young woman with long hair is handing out posies. "You're very beautiful," she says, smiling, "have a bottle of flowers." All of these people appear to be disturbingly sober: nobody wants to give the NYPD an excuse to crack down.

Not that they need an excuse. There can be no swifter political lesson than the first blast of pepper spray to the face received by a middle-class protester, and right now a lot of American activists are learning fast. "No Bulls, No Bears, just Pigs," reads one sign. As the light fades and the rain starts to come down hard, hundreds of protesters, reporters and members of the press are still trapped on the bridge. In the pouring drizzle, they strap their backpacks onto their fronts so the police can't take them, according to Kristen Gwynne, a New York writer. Gwynne tells Alternet that protesters are singing to keep morale up: 'this little light of mine.' Hundreds more are cuffed and on vans headed to jail. "I had a feeling as soon as we walked onto the bridge that this wasn't going to end well," says Michael, a member of the march. "The police allowed people to go on the car ramp on the bridge, and when they realised what was happening, people started jumping onto the pedestrian side, but then it was too late." Young teenagers are among the arrestees, in scenes extremely reminiscent of the Westminster Bridge kettle in London in December 2010. "You can't arrest an idea!" the protesters yell.

But what is the idea? The most consistent criticism laid against the occupiers is their lack of a central organising system or core message. Who are these people, and what do they want? The fact that the mainstream media is even asking this question can be considered a victory for the Occupy Wall Street.

Part of the point of this occupation, like the occupations in Greece, Spain and London, has been to create a different kind of political space, a temporary reality outside the lassitudes of mainstream politics where human beings are equal and respected. People have come from all over the country and all over the world to be here, and not all of them, contrary to most of the reports, are white and college-educated. I meet black high-schoolers from Brooklyn, young men from California, young women from St Louis, Maine and Wisconsin, older laid-off workers from Texas and Virginia, and activists from Spain who have come to see if America can really host the kind of revolutionary space that has been opening up across Europe and the Middle East. It seems that, in its own way, it can: copycat protests are opening up across the country, from Chicago to Denver to Los Angeles and Boston.

As night falls in New York, in a bright, busy space under some colourful tarpaulins, the media team is working flat out to deal with international press enquiries, as reports come in that 700 protesters have been arrested by the New York Police Department (NYPD). There is a tense, frenzied atmosphere, with laptops flung down in between knots of cables as volunteers scarf down donated pizza and field information coming in over the wires. Outside the media tent, thousands of people are taking part in a mass meeting, huddled inside plastic ponchos and under umbrellas. NYPD have forbidden amplification, so anything said at the front is immediately chanted back by three hundred voices so that the rest can hear, giving the meeting the call-and-response a feel of a sermon. Every evening, these large General Assemblies gather to debate the demands and direction of the group, and a loose statement is eventually agreed by consensus and published in the group's newspaper, the "Occupied Wall Street Journal."

So far, it's pick-your-own cause, with grievances ranging from bank bail-outs to animal testing, and yet what most of the mainstream media seems to have missed is the fact that the occupation itself is its own demand. It's a symbolic and practical reappropriation of space at the heart of the world's most financially powerful square mile, an alternative community opening up like a magic window on a fairer future.

Activists wandering back from the bridge are greeted by strangers with open arms, as members of the 'comfort' team dash around taking care of everyone. There is free coffee, free food, a young lady with a lip-ring offering free hugs, and painted signs saying "Freedom". Nobody expected the occupation at Liberty Plaza to last this long or to become this important, but the mass arrests today have ignited public anger and drawn the attention of the press across the world. Whatever happens next, Occupy Wall Street is sending a message to the American people: the 99 percent are still here, in the shadow of the glittering palaces of global finance, and they are beginning to dream dangerously, and they will not go away quietly.

Let's use Your Freedom to chuck out the Digital Economy Act

Nick Clegg is angling for some much-needed goodwill from the left with his announcement this morning that the public will be able to nominate 'unecessary laws' that they want to see repealed. The Deputy Prime Minister is crowdsourcing people's ideas for the repeal or reform of legislation in three key areas:

* Laws that have eroded civil liberties.

* Regulations that stifle the way charities and businesses work.

* Laws that are not required and which are likely to see law-abiding citizens criminalised.

The Your Freedom website allows the public to suggest changes to invasive laws and 'rate' those which they would like the government to consider for repeal or reform in the upcoming Freedom Bill, which will be unveiled in the autumn.

Depending on which suggestions make it into the Bill, this may well herald a whole new way of forming policy, as well as allowing Clegg to put on a solemn voice and inform us that "Today is the launch of Your Freedom," rather like a civil servant auditioning for the role of deranged desert prophet. The Your Freedom initiative isn't precisely direct digital democracy - the government has no obligation to consider any of the suggestions, which, according to the Telegraph, will be 'sifted' before any assessment is made - but it's a start.

There's really only one way for civil liberties campaigners to respond to such an unprecedented display of faith in digital politics: with a lobby to reform the antediluvian Digital Economy Act, removing the sections of the bill which threaten internet users with summary disconnection for engaging in free filesharing. This morning, a group of Open Rights Group Supporters and opponents of the Digital Economy Bill, led by Katie Sutton, convenor of the Stop Disconnection Demonstration in March, put together the following statement:

The Digital Economy Act (DEA) is an insult to British citizens, and the government should consider its repeal in the upcoming freedom bill as a matter of urgency. The DEA was rushed through at the tail-end of the last Parliament in an undemocratic manner, allowing the owners of copyrighted content such as music and film (rights holders) to demand that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) cut someone's Internet connection if they suspect that they have downloaded copyrighted content.
Rights holders only need to prove that the wrongdoing occurred using the Internet connection they wish to be cut, not that the persons affected are guilty. This leaves account holders responsible for the actions of anyone using their connection, whether legitimately or by piggybacking without permission.
In this digital age, an internet connection is essential for simple tasks like banking, paying bills and jobhunting, and as a result, taking away a connection used by several people as punishment for the actions of an individual who may not even be known to them is fundamentally wrong.
Simply put, the Act imposes disproportionate, collective punishment, does not follow the principle of innocent until proven guilty and contravenes the Magna Carta, which in 1215 stated that, as a basic human right, no person may be punished without a fair trial.
The Digital Economy Act is a massive insult to our civil liberties and should be repealed in its entirety, subjectto the less objectionable clauses being redrafted and discussed democratically in the Houses of Parliament to pave the way for a proper digital economy which does not punish innocent people.

If the Liberal Democrats are looking for 'bad laws', they should look no further than the Digital Economy Act, which was forced through during the wash-up despite huge opposition from a digital grassroots movement of internet users, civil rights protestors and allies within Westminster. The Act could be construed in any of the three available categories, as a threat to civil liberties (in 2009, EU amendment 138/46 declared that access to the internet is a fundamental human right), as a threat to businesses and charities (many sections of the music, film and other UK creative industries depend on filesharing to support their business model and disseminate ideas) and as an unecessary law that threatens to criminalise the seven million law-abiding British internet users who are currently regular filesharers.

It's only a pity that the Liberal Democrats, who voiced their opposition to the Digital Economy Bill in March, couldn't be bothered to turn up to vote against this regressive, draconian law in significant numbers during the parliamentary wash-up. Still, better late than never: for those of us who care about digital rights, the patronisingly-titled Your Freedom site is a brilliant opportunity to make our voices heard.

What you can do: rate and comment on any or all of the following suggestions, uploaded to the Your Freedom website by concerned citizens, to repeal aspects of the Digital Economy Act. It's telling that within hours of the site going live, a number of suggestions to reform the Act have already been put forward, alongside some sillier ideas for what the government should throw out ('The EU In General' is my favourite so far). I've selected what seem to be the most comprehensive and well-supported proposals, referring to specific clauses of the Act that need to be repealed. All of them deserve your rating and comments:

1.[link coming soon] - an official proposal put together by the Open Rights Group in consultation with human rights lawyers and digital freedom activists. If you only vote for one idea, make it this one.

2. Save Britain's Digital Economy By Repealing The Digital Economy Act

3. Repeal the Digital Economy Act 2010

You'll need to login or register at the Your Freedom website, but the process takes a few seconds and does not require you to give out sensitive information. New Statesman is not officially backing this campaign, but I certainly am, and if you believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, you should be, too.

Watching the watchers: Climate Camp and the summer of rage

Shambling through the kitchen with my face in a massive plate of pasta last night, I heard the door crash open: my friend who shall henceforth be known as Activist Polly*, veteran of the summer of hate, had come back from Climate Camp.

'Oh my GOD, Laurie, it was awful,' she moaned. 'Climate Camp was full of hippies!'

The fact that Polly might have expected something different is key to the essential weirdness of Climate Camp. The idea is - well, it's not simple, but stay with me. It's a protest, you see, a four-day sit-in protest about...something. The environment. Capitalism, also. And associated...badnesses. And we swoop, you see, we all gather in various parts of the city and swoop, not walk, swoop, on text-command from our remote superiors towards a target which we don't know what it is yet but we'll definitely be told about on the day. Possibly we'll go to the Bank of England, and everyone will see, because it'll be in London. I'm certainly planning to take lots and lots of photographs. How about you?

Being a young cool lefty kind of person, I'm aware of many people who are at Climate Camp - and every single one of them has gone with the express or primary intention of taking photographs. Photographs of the protesters; photographs of the police, in particular, as public rage over not being allowed to turn the gaze of surveillance back on our beetle-backed overpigs is still simmering merrily away. Hundreds of amateur photographers - and that's not counting the thousands of press cameras, which reports from the frontline assure me practically outnumbered those who were officially there to protest. Every single one of them just waiting for something to kick off between the coppers and the crusties like it did at G20.

The question begs itself: if you have a protest where most people have gone along to take photographs of a protest happening, is that still a protest? If so, what about? In the case of Climate Camp, any original intentions seem to have been lost in a flurry of press taking pictures of the protesters taking pictures of the police taking pictures of us. Political voyeurism: marvellous, and utterly mad.

Climate Camp is, at root, a protest about having a protest. A glance at the extensive and exciting-sounding programme of workshops shows more sessions about - activism for students, community organising, the legacies of the Brixton riots, than sessions about the actual environment. M'ladies from Feminist Fightback, never previously the vegan police, have gone down to lead a workshop about the targeting of women in protest zones, tying it all together with Greenham Common. A glance at the shiny shiny website turns up 'Photos from the Camp', 'Media Circus Twitter Feed' and 'Our Open Letter to the Police' and precisely zero aims and objectives.

This is a virtual protest, conducted on Twitter and Flicker and in the newsfeeds of all the major paper sites, all waiting for something to happen, for the violence behind the screens to transfer to ephemeral meatspace reality. We've set the bar for the ultimate 21st-century direct action: a protest where nobody apart from press, photographers and twitterhounds turns up at all and they all have to watch each other and take pictures of each other in an infinitely recursive loop of pseudo-political voyeurism until we are all drained entirely or someone behind a camera screen somewhere stumbles across the face of truth.

This has been a hard, weird summer. People are in pain, and they are angry, young people in particular: but the response to that anger has been confused. A significant proportion of this summer's protestors have not been politically active before; hopelessness, worklessness or a dawning comprehension that they're all a bunch of bastards who want to screw us and then take pictures of it has driven a lot of young people into political activism, many of whom lacked an initial understanding of the issues involved. That's not necessarily a bad thing: but it changes the terms of this summer's political unrest to something more directionless, more systemic, more fundamentally frightening and exuberant.

All of those lost kids pulling on their flak-jackets and soft-shoeing it down to the police line, all of them have cameras in their pockets. Cameras are the contemporary semiotic equivalent of the concealed bottle, the brick in a sock, the pocketknife: they are understood as power in the hands of the people, gaze and evidence and connectivity and protection, keener than any blade.

Which is just as well, really, because if the majority of this summer's protestors hadn't though it was more effective to bring a camera to a demo than a big fuckoff stick, it might all have got a lot more bloody. There is anger, now, on the streets, in our living rooms, seething. The young are fed up and chancing for a fight. The Met police are on record saying they're 'up for it'; the people on the other side of the cordons want to kick something off; the press and hundreds of amateur photographers want to be there behind a screen taking notes when that thing, whatever it is, kicks off.

The irony is of course, that is IS kicking off - in Birmingham and Codnor and in a score of other places away from the glare of the cameras, neo-nazis are trading blows with anti-fascists, feminists are marching, socialists are organising. But outside London, the press aren't interested; instead, we're drawn to the pretend protest, the virtual protest. Instead, we're all standing on the protest line behind little flashing screens, watching them watching us watching them.

*Activist Polly wishes it to be clear that she does not agree with the content of this article and that any comments about fucking hippies were made strictly in jest.

Hobby horses of the apocalypse!

Good grief, but the G20 protests are kicking up some action. According to Red Pepper's tweeter-on-the-ground, all you can hear is barking dogs and police helicopters, and it's getting ugly. Like an idiot, I promised myself that I'd stay home and ohyes, get a lot of work done all day like a good girl. What's actually happened is that I've been sat in front of the laptop getting wriggly, checking the news every thirty seconds, letting a succession of cups of tea go cold and wishing I was down on the streets.

Because I believe in the power of protest, and because this one in particular bloody fascinates me. I freely admit that I thought the 'four hoursemen of the apocalypse' four-pronged march stunt might be a little complicated to pull off, but the jammy bastards seem to have made it work, and my god the symbolism smells great.

Because although the terms are narrower than those of Saturday's march, it still isn't a protest demanding any one specific, actual thing. It's the people of Britain, on the streets of London, angry about the apocalypse their lords and masters have brought down on their heads. It's insurrection in its purest form, and in its most archaic form: it's the pageantry of the old May-Day celebrations, the traditional time of public anarchy, complete with hobby-horses.

The hobby horse is a traditional British carnival figure from folklore, - you might recognise it as the same type of freaky-looking stick-and-blanket horse that led the procession in The Wicker Man . The hobby-horse represents anarchy, foreboding, the changing of the seasons, and really bad seventies haircuts, amongst many other things. Look, here's a video of the 'Old 'Oss at Padstow.

Now, here's a video of the four horsemen of the apocalypse this week in London. Click through to 1:05. Now, imagine Christopher Lee dancing in front of that ominous samba band with a great big grin on his terrible scary face.

See what I mean?

I can't imagine an apter piece of semiotic street theatre. Something deep in the blood and the bone is infesting these protests. Something in our cultural memory calls to us, and no, I don't have a drop of English blood in my veins, but I can feel it too. This country is angry. The land is angry. The people have brought their carnival of apocalypse to the streets of London, as they have done for thousands of years.

This is a festival of fury, a carnival of chaos. This is the British people calling down the doom of the seasons and reminding the Men of Property that they rule only at our behest, and they'd better not forget it. Are the G20 frightened? Are the city workers frightened, with the howling, laughing mob under their windows screaming for them to jump?

They should be.

Oh, the hell with it. I'm not getting any work done at all any more. Girls and boys, come out to play. See you at the riot.

Put People First March 28/03/09

My throat is raw. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs:

One, two, three, four -
Corporate bailouts no more!
Five, six, seven, eight -
Spend it on the welfare state!

There's city dust in my eyes, and my legs feel like blocks of wood as we take the final mile down Picadilly towards Hyde Park. A painted banner flaps against my body, proclaiming us Anti-Capitalist Feminists. And I'm still chanting. I'm an animal, a tiny, burning ball of rage and justice, I've got all my sisters with me, it's been four hours since my last latte and I'm running on adrenaline and outrage. Me and thirty-five thousand others.

And yet the Put People First march is still, somehow, suffused with an air of pessimism. The Troops Out Of Baghdad placards look especially mournful: because yes, we have been here before. The last time I marched down Picadilly in the cold March breeze with thousands upon thousands of angry fellow citizens, we wanted to stop the troops going in to Baghdad, and we were heard, and we were ignored. The samba players are overwhelmed by the thump and screech of a marching band from the end of the world, and the set-piece of the procession is a cheery twenty-foot tall rendering of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Thunderclouds are gathering.

A woman I'm marching with tells me that she doesn't think the G20 will change anything even if it's in their power to do so. Ahead of me, in front of the RMT banners, an old man is explaining to the just-walking little boy holding his hand about the protests in 1981. We've seen all this before. So why are we still here?

We're here because we're fed up of being lied to. We're here because we've been royally screwed over, and now we're angry. We're here because even if we don't expect to be listened to, that doesn't mean we'll stop trying to be heard. Not ever.

On my way home through Green Park, tired beyond words, I pick a bunch of wilting daffodils that glow faintly in my grimy hands in the noonlight. Around the corner, the band are still playing, the people are still screaming, the dull rumble of thirty-five-thousand feet is still ringing down the thoroughfare. Dreamily, I give out the daffs to the rows of police officers standing in front of the Ritz. One of them even takes a flower, and pops it in his lapel.

Photos to follow.