At 'Flood Wall Street', NYPD Arrested a Polar Bear and Burst the Carbon Bubble
A man tries to lasso the Bull statue on Wall Street. Image: Flood Wall Street/Flickr

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At 'Flood Wall Street', NYPD Arrested a Polar Bear and Burst the Carbon Bubble

Three years after Occupy Wall Street, many familiar faces returned with a more pointed message for "Flood Wall Street," and they left with at least three powerful symbols.

The last time lower Manhattan really got flooded, during Hurricane Sandy, it left behind millions of dollars in damage. This time the flood was much more peaceful and less destructive—some one thousand people carrying signs, hoisting a giant "carbon bubble" balloon, and chanting songs about the environment and fossil fuels and Wall Street's role in all of it.

Absent were real troublemakers, like the anarchist bloc that last reared its black-bandana-swathed head on Wall St. during Occupy in 2011. Instead, everyone here was dressed in blue, to complete the metaphor of #FloodWallStreet. "We are the cloud bloc," one protester joked.The atmosphere was different from the giant, also-peaceful People's Climate March on Sunday. That march, advertised in the subways as something that would include "everyone," seemed considerably more concerned with numbers than with content, or what to do with people once they arrived.

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A team of Columbia scientists, all dressed in lab coats and ready to march through Manhattan with gusto, had to wait more than three hours on 81st street before they finally began their slow walk. Likewise, at the end of the march, when people wanted to feel a sense of triumph that they had done their part and arrived at a destination, there was only a volunteer saying, "welcome to the end of the march," and cautioning people that the block party on 34th street was already too full to attend.

But if the People's Climate March was a little light on utilizing the 400,000 people who had shown up, its purpose was to demonstrate to the UN that global climate change is a crucial, hugely popular issue, and it did that successfully.

The front of Monday's protest (Image: FloodWallStreet)

Whereas the subway ads for Sunday's march spoke of global climate change as the cause that brought "hipsters and bankers" together, on Monday, those very bankers were the enemy. And unlike Sunday's event, Monday's protest was not sanctioned by the city or the NYPD.

"Yesterday was about the problem," a member of the Flood Wall Street brigade explained to a passerby on Broadway yesterday who wanted to know what the hullabaloo was all about. "And today is about the fact that some people are profiting from the problem." As the protesters flooded the streets of lower Manhattan, swarming traffic and immobilizing it, they chanted, "we are unstoppable/ another world is possible."

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Protesters encounter traffic on Broadway (Photo by Lucy Teitler)

By 2 PM, the thousand protesters—many of them veterans of Occupy—had been turned away from their intended destination, the Stock Exchange, and found themselves occupying Broadway instead, just north of the famous Bull statue.

The NYPD had diverted traffic for blocks, leaving ample room. (Chalk it up, perhaps, to the newer, more "friendlier" administration of Mayor de Blasio, and to very ugly lessons learned on both sides from 2011.) Here, the protesters played a waiting game with the police and passed the time with small meetings and rousing chants and dances and marching band music, led by a dozen-piece ensemble of horns and drums. Leaders—or those who spontaneously decided to become them—told the crowd to get to know one another, and to talk about ways to take the energy of the movement back home with them.

NYPD community affairs officer Rick Lee, aka "the hipster cop." Image: Lucy Teitler

Many passersby stopped to ask questions. At one point, a motorcyclist exchanged a high-five with a series of marchers who were obstructing his way. People and schoolchildren in buildings along lower Broadway were glued to their windows, curious about what was going on below, especially at one moment, when they had a perfect view of a nude protester being arrested. But just as many were angry and alienated. "This is ridiculous," muttered a man in a suit as the navigated along Broadway. "Go home!"

Video by Alex Pasternack

The day had started with brief speeches by Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges, delivered over the "People's Mic," whereby the speaker shouts to the nearby crowd and the crowd repeats the speaker for everyone else to hear. At one point later, an older protester shouted a call entreating his fellow protesters to occupy Zuccoti Park again. No one seemed interested in repeating that.

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Read more: Natural Disasters Displaced Three Times More People Than War in 2013 

But even if the location of the temporary occupation wasn't deliberate, it wasn't without symbolism: the demonstrators had ended up right in front of the Standard Oil Building. And the Bull nearby, which someone tried to lasso, is itself a work of guerrilla tactics, placed there one night after the stock market crash of 1987 by sculptor Arturo Di Modica. It was removed by police, only to be reinstalled thanks to the outcry of New Yorkers. (The bull now even has his own Twitter account.)

The "carbon bubble" before being popped by the police. Image: Lucy Teitler

The scene of brief occupation was reminiscent of Occupy's Zuccotti Park, albeit with less tension in the air but still a sense of nervous uncertainty and a small sense of chaos.

The music and dancing, the costumes, the sitting: the demonstration's games in the streets weren't just fun-loving bouts of traffic disruption, but, arguably, symbols of urban disruption that were meant to be hard to ignore—a sign of something vital that, like an actual flood, comes as a shock to the system of the city. And a shock, after all, might get other people to stop and listen and think about changing things.

Protestors waving to middle school students. (Image: Alex Pasternack)

But there weren't many shocks, largely because there wasn't much tension. The main surprise wasn't really a surprise—the protestors weren't allowed near the Stock Exchange, a destination they had plastered all over their website for the police to see. When a smaller group of protesters approached the Wall Street barricades at 3 PM and began pushing forward against a mass of policemen, they were pepper-sprayed.

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"The police freaked out and they ended up pepper-spraying everyone in front of the barricades," a 25-year-old protestor, Anthony Robledo,  told FastCoExist. "They got about 10 people."

Come nightfall, some 100 people would be arrested for not moving under police orders, carted off into two buses as people chanted "We believe that we will win!" One person wrote on Facebook that it was "the slowest mass arrest I've ever seen."

Lawyers in identical hats stand around waiting for the march to begin. They confirmed that about 100 people were arrested in total. Image: Lucy Teitler

For much of the day, however, the feel was generally more relaxed. It seemed like a natural extension of  the People's Climate March the day before. And that left some ruminating about what could have been.

"It was more of a parade than a march," one younger demonstrator named John told me, as he waved a blue flag that said "Stop Climate Change. #FloodWallStreet." He said he wished the message of the demonstrations had been clearer and more focused and not conflicted by the reported sponsorship of the parade by a litany of Big Corporations. ( Lockheed Martin, Ikea, and others are sponsors of the Climate Group, which helped organize the march.)

On the southern end of Broadway looking south. Image: Lucy Teitler

Of course, if the march hadn't been sponsored by corporations, it might never have been able to afford the subway ads and flyers that gave it such a massive reach. And many at Flood Wall Street seemed glad that the Occupy mentality had been forcefully tied to the climate movement, something that may not have happened without something huge and mainstream like the march the day before.

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"This is more focused on the environment than Occupy, and I'm really happy about that," said a friendly young woman dressed in a flowing outfit. "Because the environment is really one of the most important issues, besides corporate personhood. Actually, that might be the most important issue."

She was ready for anything, and had taken Monday and Tuesday off work just in case. "I'm hoping for chaos," she said with a grin.

A security guard at one building (Image: Alex Pasternack)  

The chaos was mostly confined to the fun, free-wheeling spirit of the demonstrators who, for a few hours on a Monday afternoon, turned the financial center of the world's financial center into something resembling a carnival. At one point, a singing chant of "we shall overcome" was followed by the more imperative, "whose side are you on?"

But the lack of tension opened up a new important question for this and other protest movements: what now? It wasn't just a practical question for the demonstrators who had reached the Bull and found themselves largely free to do their thing, whatever that was. The question was also a much bigger, existential one: Where do we go from here?

Around 3 PM, as it seemed people were in need of some direction, one organizer articulated some of that confusion over the People's Mic: "We won't move, and we won't be moved!" he yelled to and with the crowd. "Because if we move, we won't move!"

Looking north up Broadway at the protest. Image: Alex Pasternack

"This doesn't actually solve anything related to the climate crisis," John said a little while later, pointing more specifically at the march the day before. "At best it was awareness raising. At worst it was funneling people's energies into a middle-of-the-road solution that's not a solution. There's no tensions. The chord isn't taut. You pluck it and the sound that came out was all plastic." He was similarly lukewarm about the protest.

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Then again, demonstrations are demonstrations. And while this one didn't have official approval from the city, it was conducted in a relatively orderly and nearly jubilant fashion, intended to be a symbol—"a response," said the website, "to the Climate Justice Alliance's call for non-violent direct action in the week before the United Nations Climate Summit." (The forecast for that summit, on Tuesday,  isn't terribly positive.)

Still, and even without many sensational photo ops or police face-offs, there were three arresting moments that made for vivid symbols of the fight for climate action.

1. Four people in wheelchairs were wheeled away by the police (they weren't ultimately arrested, but rather "given criminal court summons").

Four people in wheelchairs last group arrested at #FloodWallStreet First in line had his fist raised. pic.twitter.com/N9NhElhaQK

— Hunter Walker (@hunterw) September 23, 2014

2. The police popped the "carbon bubble" with the horns of the Bull.

Brief drama as Wall Street bull involuntarily gores protesters' large "carbon bubble" #FloodWallStreet pic.twitter.com/fMINDeb9QS

— Adam Gabbatt (@adamgabbatt) September 22, 2014

3. A polar bear was arrested.

And thus the iconic #FloodWallStreet photo has arrived. RT @jordanmammo: Police have arrested the polar bear pic.twitter.com/9rju9lVSo4

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 22, 2014

One of the lessons to be drawn from Occupy was that, in the rush of "direct action," it's not easy to know what ideas and tactics are going to take hold and become important. During the months when protesters were occupying public spaces all over the country and the world, the main criticism directed at them was that they hadn't defined their message. When it was over, everyone remembered the phrase "We are the 99 percent." That slogan put income inequality on the map and fundamentally changed the language Americans use to think about class. If they accomplished nothing else, the past two days have demonstrated that an urgent effort to do the same for the climate is well underway.

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The following day, a group of middle school girls was sitting in a Williamsburg cafe, chatting over a homework assignment, when one of them showed off her new sticker. It read "Divestment." She and her friends had marched on Sunday.

"You know, people went to jail last night at the protest," she said. "I care enough to march, but I don't care enough to get arrested." She paused. "Actually, I would have even gone to jail."

"We're minors though," one of them responded.

"We can still go to jail," the first girl said. "Well, it's not jail jail, it's little people jail. And people started cheering when they got arrested, not because they got in trouble but because they stood up for their beliefs. That's pretty cool."

Watch Motherboard's documentary about the hackers of the Occupy movement, and see Vice News' 9-hour-long livestream from #FloodWallStreet: