See also: Adbusters Media Foundation Take the Square Occupy Wall Street
Established
in 2011 and named after
a series of Weatherman-inspired anti-Vietnam War protests in Chicago in 1969,
USDayOfRage (USDOR) consists of thousands of activists who use
the Internet's social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to
organize demonstrations against what they describe
as “a
system or ideology that runs counter to the aims of life.” In
particular, USDOR rejects the notion that corporations should be
permitted to give financial support to the political causes of their
choice. Such spending by “special interests,” says
USDOR, amounts to a corruptive “farce” that has “silenced
and demoralized” America's “individual citizens, the legitimate
voters.”
To
rectify this situation, USDOR demands
that the Citizens
United v. FEC
Supreme Court decision of 2010 – which nullified a provision of the
McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act barring corporations and
unions from paying for political ads made independently of candidate
campaigns – be overturned. By USDOR's reckoning, “only
citizens” – and not corporations – “should make campaign
contributions,” and those contributions “should not exceed
$1 to any political candidate or party.”
To
advance this agenda along with a variety of anti-capitalist themes, USDOR at its founding scheduled public
demonstrations to be held in more
than 60 U.S. cities. The first of these – centered on Wall
Street, the hub of New York's financial district – was held on
Saturday, September 17, 2011. Smaller "satellite"
demonstrations were held that same day in Los Angeles, Seattle,
Barcelona (Spain), and elsewhere – all under the “Day of Rage”
banner.
Subsequent events promoting the same agendas were scheduled
for early October and beyond.
The original
call for the September 17 rally in New York was put out in July 2011 by
the Adbusters Media Foundation. The most notable groups to then step
forward and help organize the event were USDOR, NYC
General Assembly, Take the Square, Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.
According
to journalist Aaron Klein, the September 17 protests apparently
represented “the culmination” of a campaign by Wade Rathke,
founder of ACORN and president of an SEIU local in New Orleans, who
in March 2011 had issued a call for “days of rage in ten cities
around JP Morgan Chase.” Rathke's efforts were supported
by Stephen Lerner, an SEIU board member and radical-left organizer whose declared aims
are to “destabilize the folks that are in power and start to
rebuild a movement”; “bring down the stock market”; “bring
down [the] bonuses” of executives in the financial sector; and
“interfere with their ability to ... be rich.”
In an effort to maximize the effectiveness of those people who planned to participate
in the September 17 demonstrations, USDOR collaborated with the
National Lawyers Guild (NLG) to produce literature enumerating a host of
practical guidelines and suggestions. For additional details about this literature, click here.
Though
USDOR and its fellow organizers were hoping that at
least 20,000 people would take part in the September 17
rally in New York, the actual number of participants was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000. Throughout
the afternoon, they gathered in parks and plazas across Lower Manhattan, holding
teach-ins and displaying signs that bore messages like “Democracy
Not Corporatization” and “Revoke Corporate Personhood.”
Many of the demonstrators said
they were determined to continue their protest at least through the weekend, so they
could confront Wall Street workers the following Monday morning. Some
vowed to stay for weeks or months and likened their aims to those
of the protesters who had flooded the streets of Egypt and Spain
earlier in the year. On October 1, 2011, a horde of these Wall Street demonstrators shut down traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge for two-and-a-half hours, a move that resulted in some 700 arrests. Among the high-profile personalities who had already made personal appearances in support of the demonstrators were filmmaker Michael Moore (who spoke at the September 17 New York rally), Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons, Cornel West, Charles Barron, Frances Fox Piven, and Charles Rangel.
Professing
to be staunchly nonviolent and to be composed exclusively of volunteers
with no desire to profit financially from their activist ventures,
USDOR describes
itself as “an
idea, not a political party,” and pledges that it “will never
endorse, finance, or lend our name to any candidate or party.”