Occupy Wall St protestors face high noon showdown

Wall Street protesters are poised for an ugly confrontation with police and New York authorities trying to end the month-long occupation of a park that has spawned similar gatherings across America and is going global.

Demonstrators at the half-acre park in lower Manhattan have said they will not go anywhere at today’s 7am (noon Irish time) deadline when the park’s out-of-patience owners want them to clear out and stop pitching tents or using sleeping bags.

The company that owns the private park where the demonstrators have camped said it had become trashed and unsanitary.

Brookfield Office Properties are to begin a section-by-section power-washing of Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street.

“They’re going to use the clean-up to get us out of here,” said Justin Wedes, a 25-year-old part-time public high school science teacher from Brooklyn who was one of about 400 people in the park last night. “It’s a de facto eviction notice.”

The demand that protesters clear out sets up a turning point in a movement that began on September 17 with a small group of activists and has swelled to include several thousand people at times, from many walks of life.

Occupy Wall Street has inspired similar demonstrations across America, is spreading to Canada and Britain, and become an issue in the Republican presidential primary race.

The protesters’ demands are amorphous, but they are united in blaming Wall Street and corporate interests for the economic pain they say all but the wealthiest Americans have endured since the financial meltdown.

There was a scramble of activity in the park yesterday. Hundreds of demonstrators scrubbed benches and mopped the park’s stone flooring in an attempt to get Brookfield to abandon its plan.

Members of the protesters’ sanitation working group passed out 30-gallon bins for people to organise their belongings.

Protesters would be allowed to return after the cleaning, which was expected to take 12 hours, but Brookfield said it planned to start enforcing regulations that have been ignored.

That means no more tarpaulins, sleeping bags and storing personal property on the ground – in other words, no more camping out for the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who have been living at Zuccotti Park for weeks.

Although the park is privately owned, it is required to be open to the public 24 hours a day.

A spokesman for New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose girlfriend is a member of Brookfield’s board of directors, said Brookfield had requested the city’s assistance in maintaining the park.

“We will continue to defend and guarantee their free speech rights, but those rights do not include the ability to infringe on the rights of others,” Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna said, “which is why the rules governing the park will be enforced.”

But protesters say the only way they will leave is by force. Organisers sent out a mass email asking supporters to “defend the occupation from eviction”.

“We are doubling up on our determination to stay here as a result of this,” said 26-year-old Sophie Mascia, from Queens, who has been living in Zuccotti Park for three weeks. “I think this is only going to strengthen our movement.”

Protesters have had some run-ins with police, but mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and an incident in which some protesters were pepper-sprayed by police seemed to energise their movement.

The New York Police Department says it will make arrests if Brookfield requests it and laws are broken. Brookfield would not comment on how it would ensure that protesters do not try to set up camp again, only saying that the cleaning was necessary because conditions in the park had become unsanitary because of the occupation.

Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, expressed concern over the city’s actions as he inspected the park yesterday afternoon and listened to protesters’ complaints.

“This has been a very peaceful movement by the people,” he said. “I’m concerned about this new set of policies. At the very least, the city should slow down.”

Attorneys from the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild – who are representing an Occupy Wall Street sanitation working group – have written a letter to Brookfield saying the company’s request to get police to help implement its clean-up plan threatens “fundamental constitutional rights”.

More protests are planned in Canada this weekend, and European activists also are also joining in. Organisers announced a protesters’ “occupation” of the London Stock Exchange to begin there tomorrow.

As the hour neared for evacuation, Zuccotti Park had been cleared of about half of the protest’s supplies. The self-organised sanitation team had hired a private truck to pick up discarded roadside rubbish, and belongings were accumulating at a storage area at one corner of the park.