USA Today reports: “A crowd of several hundred protesters marched from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to the New York Stock Exchange a few blocks away on Thursday as Occupy Wall Street demonstrators across the country promised mass gatherings to mark the movement’s two-month anniversary. Lines of helmeted police, some on horseback, blocked every approach to the financial district in New York. Several streets in the area were closed.”

ROBERT WEISSMAN, via Barbara Holzer, bholzer at citizen.org, Dorry Samuels, dsamuels at citizen.org
President of Public Citizen, Weissman said today: “Occupy Wall Street has helped focus national attention on the crucial problems of our day: unchecked corporate power that chokes our economy and democracy, rising inequality that betrays the basic promise of America, joblessness when there’s work to be done, foreclosures that displace families and leave houses empty, and much more.

“The hardy bands of Occupy protesters in New York and around the country have fundamentally altered the national conversation — and not just in the media. Political and campaign discourse has changed

“The Occupy movement already has done more to help this country than anyone could reasonably have imagined. But it’s just getting started. The movement won’t be deterred by eviction efforts in New York or Portland or Oakland or St. Louis or Nashville or anywhere else. ‘We are the 99 percent’ is not a call that can be so easily silenced, nor a movement that can be stopped. Public Citizen salutes, celebrates and supports Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement.”