"Vacate the park," NY tells Occupy Wall Street.
Tensions at the encampment in Zuccotti Park; New York City government has given protesters until tomorrow to leave; the reason given is that the area needs cleaning; what now?
Protesters against the crisis and Wall Street greed were concerned Thursday after being informed by the New York City government that they must leave Zuccotti Park, where they are camped, by Friday so that authorities can clean the site. The park is managed by Brookfield Properties. New York Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said in a statement that the protesters' encampment in the park created "unsanitary conditions" at the site. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the park on Wednesday to offer reassurances to the protesters.
Protesters say the attempt to clean the park is a strategy to demobilize the protests. "The cleanup is a pretext to remove us from the encampment. We can only return if we obey the rules made by Brookfield," said Justin Wedes, 25, a public school teacher in the Brooklyn neighborhood who joined the protests.
The protest known as Occupy Wall Street spread from New York to several other American cities, including Boston, Cincinnati, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Providence, and Seattle, among others.
On Thursday, protests in the US gained support from former Polish President Lech Walesa, who stated that he intends to visit the protesters in the US or write in support of the protests. Walesa led the Gdnask (Dantzig) workers' union in communist Poland in 1980 and was one of the founders of the Solidarity movement. Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1983, was president of Poland between 1990 and 1995, after the end of communism.
Walesa said that the global economic crisis made people aware that "we need to change the capitalist system" because "we need more justice, more power for the people, and less money for money's sake."
Another who commented on the protests in the US was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. Khamenei said on Wednesday that the wave of protests in the heart of the capitalist system reflects a serious problem that will ultimately bring down American capitalism. He stated that the US is in the midst of the crisis because "its corrupt foundations have been exposed to the American people."
Khamenei's comments came a day after the US accused Iran of plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, an event that was allegedly planned, though not carried out, in 2007.