Anti-Wall Street activists began rebuilding their tent encampment on the steps of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), student plaza and cheered wildly when former US labor secretary Robert Reich implored them to take a moral stand against the very rich owning so much of the US’ wealth.
The daylong strike on Tuesday and peaceful demonstrations against big banks and education cuts culminated in about 4,000 people rallying at the Reich speech on the steps of the same student plaza that first launched the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.
“The days of apathy are over, folks,” said Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. “We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy were built. There are some people out there who say we cannot afford education any longer, we cannot provide social services for the poor ... but how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before?”
Photo: AFP
Demonstrators have been making their voices heard in US town squares since September.
The protests were disrupted earlier in the day by a campus shooting inside the Haas School of Business. Officials did not know if the suspect was part of the Occupy Cal movement, said Ute Frey, a spokeswoman for the university.
“I just hope it wasn’t from the protest or the movement, because that’s not what the movement is about,” said Sadia Saif, a 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore.
The shooting didn’t prevent thousands of students and demonstrators from gathering at the university to vote on a list of demands and await Reich’s Mario Savio Lecture, named for the political activist and leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. Savio’s impassioned speeches on the same steps of Sproul Hall against the Vietnam War and racial inequality prompted thousands of students to join the movement.
“Every social movement in the last half-century or more — it started with moral outrage,” Reich said, likening Wall Street to the bullies who battered him when he was an especially short kid. “You understand how important it is to fight the bullies, to protect the powerless.”
Protesters also cheered as at least 10 tents were constructed on the steps, less than a week after baton-wielding police clashed with people who tried to defy a campus ban on camping.
The Occupy Cal students were joined by hundreds of Occupy Oakland demonstrators who marched the 8km from Oakland to Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue, chanting: “Here comes Oakland.”
Police cleared their tent city outside Oakland City Hall on Monday amid complaints about safety and sanitation and arrested more than 50 people.
Occupy Cal’s general assembly voted in favor of inviting the university’s chancellor and board of regents to a debate next month and sending the educational officials a list of demands, including a tuition rollback to 2009 levels.
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