Roy Cox plays a clarinet during the Occupy Austin protest at city hall on Thrusday Oct 6. Photo by Raymond Thompson
By Ari Phillips
For Reporting Texas
AUSTIN — Austin has joined the growing list of cities taking cues from the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, with local demonstrators “occupying” City Hall all day Thursday and expressing a varied set of grievances.
According to the Austin Police Department, about 1,300 joined the local protest, and none were arrested. Allen Weber, a documentary photographer who came to Austin after attending Occupy Wall Street protests in New York for several weeks, said that the demonstration here reminded him of the early days of Occupy Wall Street.
“It was a very disorganized process,” Weber, 29, said. “Pretty much anyone who was there could start anything they wanted to start.”
The movement then got little media exposure. “There was no there there,” said Bill Keller, former executive editor and now a columnist for The New York Times, of the early days of the movement. Keller, who was in Austin this week to speak at the University of Texas and at the LBJ Library, said that the Occupy Wall Street “started out amorphous, diffuse and with no common objectives — just a general expression of dissatisfaction.”
After several weeks, the Occupy Wall Street movement firmly established itself. “They got bigger every day,” Weber said of the protests, which continue to grow in prominence and have spawned hundreds of protests across the country and the world.
“I don’t think that anything has existed like this before,” Weber said of the protests. He classified the unifying principle of the protesters as “a general discontent with the state of affairs.”
During the first day of Occupy Austin, participants stepped up to a microphone to offer a wide range of proposals, including verifying identities on social networking, getting corporate money out of the political system and taking action against Capital Metro for its MetroRail project.
James Raines, a 22-year-old University of Texas psychology major who demonstrated at City Hall, said that the Occupy Wall Street protests “definitely resonated with me.”
“I’ve been looking at all the jobs and industries in the world that have really become backwards from their initial intention,” he said.
“Our human capital is not able to be utilized,” Raines continued. “I sit on the bus every day with someone that just got a degree from University of Texas aerospace engineering and he works at a hotel for $11 an hour.”
Jeremy Croke, en route to volunteer at the SXSW Eco conference being held across town, stopped by City Hall to show his support. “I’m just fed up with current state of affairs,” he said. “Corporate plutocracy and its influence in every aspect of American life. I’m just sick of the impression.”
Car horns consistently drowned out the voices of protesters, as drivers along Lake Austin Boulevard expressed their support to the row of sign holders. “I saw a great sign that said ‘the beginning is near,’” Croke said. “I think it’s been a long time coming.”