The police have dropped barricades around the entire plaza, but rumors that they are coming in are so far unfounded. The medical team has calmed down and are eating pizza from the boxes being carried throughout the plaza. A giant projection on the wall of a building across Trinity Street reminds the protesters "The Whole World is Watching #OccupyWallStreet." 

A large group of people are holding signs and singing "This Little Light of Mine" down at the base of the plaza, almost to Trinity Street, where Ed Schultz of MSNBC is broadcasting his show live on the other side of the police barricade. An officer tells me the barricades aren't shutting us in, I'm welcome to leave at the corners of the plaza. 

Despite an earlier clash with police (28 arrests reported, a far cry from Saturday's 700-plus) as a breakaway march from the permitted, union-supported solidarity rally headed down Wall Street proper, the plaza is mostly quiet. 

Chris from the medical team, a firefighter from New Jersey, tells me that he treated one marcher who made it back to the plaza after having been pepper-sprayed. Videos and photographs are starting to circulate online of the clash with police, which include two Fox 5 reporters hit with batons and pepper spray. 

Phillip Anderson, a local blogger and activist, was on the march to Wall Street and told me this story: 

"We saw a ton of people crossing Broadway and decided to see what was happening. Easily 1000 people headed toward Wall Street; the cops made sure we didn't go straight there, so we took a circuitous route. When we got to Wall and William St., there was a barricade along the west side of William, along Cipriani, and people on the balcony above with glasses of champagne.

"It was obvious the cops weren't going to let the crowd go right so they went east down Wall, and then I don't know what happened but they came back loud and moving fast, drums banging. Instantly the cops moved the barricade to the east side, there were cops on horses, cops on scooters, they barricaded themselves in the middle and the crowd got to the edge of the barricade and then everyone just shut up. Dead quiet. I'm going to give those cops a lot of credit, they opened a corner and let the crowd walk out and the scooter cops escorted them almost all the way back." 

The chant from the crowd, he said, was "Cops are the 99 percent!" 

*******

Earlier in the day, over 20,000 people packed Foley Square near New York’s City Hall and marched to Liberty Plaza to support the occupiers, who are on day 19 of their protest. Colorful union signs dotted the crowd as well as the handmade kind, showing delegations from the United Auto Workers, Amalgamated Transit Union, Teamsters, City University of New York faculty, and many, many more. All of the protesters I spoke to knew exactly why they were there.

"When someone's looking for a job, they're not visible," Jesse LaGreca, a blogger at Daily Kos who recently became an Internet celebrity for his smackdown of Fox News in an interview leaked to the Web, told me. The occupation, and the massive march in support, made those problems visible. LaGreca's takedown of Griff Jenkins, whom he called "one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Tea Party movement," resonated with activists tired of not being taken seriously. He pointed out "The last thing they want is someone who can clearly state why we're here. It's called Occupy Wall Street, not big bake sale, for God's sake." 

“Naturally we would join,” said Lisanne McTerran, a New York City teacher wearing her United Federation of Teachers hat. She pointed out that the unions have been in this fight for a while, noting that UFT had marched down Wall Street back in May to protest continued banker power. McTerran is an art teacher by trade, but has been working as a substitute since New York’s school budget cuts.

“Arts are the first thing they cut,” she said, handing out a flyer that points out that budget cuts have led directly to the loss of over 100,000 jobs. “Bloomberg wants to bust the teachers’ union,” she said.

The official, permitted rally began at 4pm and it seemed strange to hear the sound of a loudspeaker broadcasting speeches as we approached in a crowd from Liberty Plaza. The crowd of occupiers still communicated on the move using the “people’s mic,” repeating each other’s words back, and it did seem that the union leaders who spoke took a page from the activists in the square, keeping their words brief and powerful, stoking the crowd's excitement at the popular support they were receiving. The organizers at Occupy Wall Street have been reaching out to labor from the beginning, and their efforts were paying off. 

Stuart Appelbaum, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) New York City local RWDSU, told the crowd that he had a message for Mayor Bloomberg. “If your police department overreacts again like it did last Saturday, stifling dissent and limiting free speech, New Yorkers will not stand for it!”

Héctor Figueroa of SEIU’s 32BJ, the building service workers’ union, made the connection between the occupiers in Liberty Plaza and the international protests that have echoed around the world in recent months, declaring, “Nosotros somos los indignados del Nueva York, los indignadoes del Estados Unidos, los indignados del mundo!” 

It was a sentiment heard at my first visit to the occupation, when I met Spanish activist Monica Lopez, who had been part of Spain’s “Indignados” movement. Lopez has been back to Spain and is now back again at the Liberty Plaza occupation, taking photos and working the media table.

“It’s the right thing at the right time after so many mistakes,” Thomas Blewitt, told me when I asked why he was involved in this movement. Blewitt, a former member of ACT UP in a trim shirt and tie, was one of the many defying the popular image of the protesters as all young hippies. He explained that he’d cared for his mother until her death and between Medicare and the AARP, ”That system works." Everyone, he pointed out, deserves the same access to health care.

Health care was also on the minds of the National Nurses United, which came out in force with professionally printed signs declaring support for Occupy Wall Street on one side--and calling for a financial transactions tax on the other, as the union has been for months. “It’s catching on like wildfire,” Pam Merriman, a nurse from the University of Chicago, told me.

“The hardest pill to swallow,” her colleague Talisa Hardin said, “is America is hurting, and when you look at how well corporations are doing, it doesn’t seem fair.”

The nurses’ president, Karen Higgins, spoke at the rally as well. “We’re sick of the greed!” she told the crowd. “As nurses, we can fix that.”

And Merriman reiterated: “The nurses will not be moved.”

Lindsay Personett, a recent graduate in dance performance from Oklahoma City University, was handing out flyers that read “I Owe SallieMae,” and offering a marker to fellow grads who’ve found themselves in debt to the loan giant. “Kids are told to get this expensive degree and you’ll get a job,” she said. “You end up owing too much and owning nothing.”

As the march moved off slowly through the financial district, I ducked into a cafe and struck up a conversation with Joel Wise, a tall, burly member of Operating Engineers Local 68 from New Jersey. Wise noted that his union had yet to express an opinion on the occupation, but told me “I’m here as an American, proud to be a union member.” He told me that the sign he’d been carrying earlier, which he’d given away on the street, had read “The Tea Party is Owned By Big Business.”

Wise’s friend commented, “If they keep monetizing debt, it’s gonna be ugly,” and Wise continued “Most people are outraged that white-collar criminals weren’t prosecuted. If you steal a loaf of bread, or a kid sells some weed, they go to jail for five years, but these guys stole millions.” 

As I leave Liberty Plaza at 10:30, a lawyer hands me his card, telling me "I used to be a prosecutor here, I know what they're capable of." The man, whose card declares him to be Musa Ali, a proud supporter of the LGBT community, then joins the legal team in a small huddle. 

I am struck once again at the ease with which the organization here falls back into its duties. The medics treat the injured or sick, the food team hands out pizza, rumors are quashed with a quick "mic check" and the legal team works to keep people out of jail--or get them out quickly. 

I walk out past the barricades, a girl passes me with her dog, and police vans move down the street. An officer tells me that I'm probably better off picking up a train to the north rather than the south, and I take his advice, hearing a round of cheers erupt behind me from something going on in the plaza.

And so the uneasy truce at Liberty Plaza holds, but the protesters inside remember the feeling of elation, of support from the huge crowds earlier. It's not just rhetoric; they know that they are the 99 percent.

This is only getting bigger. 

When you climb out of the subway at Wall Street, you might wonder why there are no protestors in the cavernous alley by the stock exchange. That’s because since 9/11, Wall Street has been barricaded shut to prevent possible attacks. But up the block at Zuccotti Park between Liberty and Cedar streets, west of Broadway, the party’s on.

There you’ll find a festive group of about 1,000 people, mostly young folks having a good time accompanied by the occasional cluster of old lefties singing songs. People make signs while sitting on the ground then prop them up wherever they can find a space. They gather at tables filled with donated food and browse boxes of donated books. You also can’t miss the swarm of media folks milling around asking questions, taping interviews and taking notes: they’re the ones in dress suits who spend most of their time interviewing each other. My favorite sign held by an occupier is painted on a skateboard: “This is what Freedom Looks Like.” My son would agree.

And my recurring thought is, “It’s about f’ing time.”

What took us so long? How much worse did it have to get before public outrage would finally focus on those who caused the problem and those who are milking us dry? Several of us have been pleading in blog after blog for more than two years to build a broad-based assault on Wall Street. Where was our answer to the Tea Party? Well, here it is.

There’s no telling where this Occupy Wall Street can lead, especially if a virtuous media feedback loop continues: The more protestors, the more coverage, the more protestors. It’s about the only good thing the mainstream media has done in years.

If unions throw into the mix full force, we may have something powerful in the making. It’s far too early to tell, although the October 5 labor march in New York that drew upwards of 25,000 people was certainly a good sign. Will labor come back and do it again each and every week? Will unions mobilize support for the satellite occupiers in city after city? Or will most of their energy go into the Obama/Democratic Party re-election campaigns as if nothing much has happened? (They should listen to protestors, who agree that corporations and the wealthy are destroying our democracy by buying candidates of both parties.)

 Already you can hear the chattering classes mumble about the lack of focus, the lack of consensus and the lack of a coherent agenda in this nascent movement. But they have this coherent call: We are the 99 percent, and we demand our fair share. The irrefutable fact is that 99 percent of us really are being screwed by the 1 percent who are looting our country (actually it’s more like the top 1/10 of one percent). So if you still harbor any doubts that Wall Street is the right target, here are 10 reasons to consider:

1. Wall Street caused the crash: Unless you are suffering from financial amnesia, you should remember that it was Wall Street’s reckless gambling that did us in. It was Wall Street banks and hedge funds, not home buyers, who created the enormous demand for high-risk mortgages to pool, to securitize, and to turn into Ponzi-like gambling structures with names like CDOs, CDO squared and synthetic CDOs. It was the money-grubbing rating agencies that blessed these pieces of garbage with AAA ratings. As a result, trillions of dollars of worthless toxic assets polluted our financial system. When the bubble they induced burst, our system crashed, causing 8 million working people to lose their jobs in a matter of months due to no fault of their own. Anyone who still blames low-income home buyers, or regulations or Greece -- or anyone other than Wall Street -- should be checked for dementia.

2. The Wall Street crash directly caused the gravest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression: We’re three years into the worst jobs crisis since 1937. Upwards of 29 million people are out of work or have been forced into part-time jobs. The number of people who have been jobless for more than 26 weeks is at post-WWII record levels. And there’s no end in sight to this misery. Meanwhile, Wall Street’s representatives in Washington want us to focus on cutting public employment and public services to address the debt that Wall Street itself precipitated. WE wouldn’t have a debt crisis were it not for the bailouts, the crash, the lost jobs and the soaring cost of jobless benefits that can be laid at Wall Street’s door. (The debt was also caused by tax cuts for the rich, and the bankers certainly don’t want to talk about that.) For those diversionary debt tactics alone, Wall Street should be occupied until it pays to replace the jobs it destroyed.

3. Wall Street profited from the bailouts and remains unaccountable:Taxpayers provided trillions of dollars in cash and asset guarantees to the wealthiest bankers and hedge fund managers in the world. But nothing was extracted from them in return. Here’s one egregious example: Goldman Sachs paid $550 million in SEC fines for selling mortgage-related securities that were designed to fail so that a large hedge fund could bet against them. The securities failed as planned and the hedge fund pocketed $1 billion in profits. But after we bailed out AIG, Goldman Sachs picked up nearly $12 billion for similar bets that AIG had insured. Goldman Sachs collected 100 cents on the dollar and those dollars were ours.

4. The super-rich are getting richer: When the economy was crashing during 2008, high frequency traders in hedge funds and banks made upwards of $20 billion from the turmoil. This trading scam provided no redeeming value to our economy. Rather, it was a hidden tax on our sorrows -- a transfer of funds from the many to the few. In 2010 the top hedge fund managers “earned” over $2 million an HOUR! The top 25 hedge fund managers took in as much as 650,000 teachers. Young people have the right to question these lopsided values. All of us have the duty to do something about it.

5. The super-rich are paying lower and lower taxes: While the government pleads poverty when asked to create a massive jobs program, our financial elites use every loophole available to avoid taxes. In 1995, the 400 wealthiest families paid about 30 percent of their income in taxes (after all deductions). Today their effective rate is less than 16 percent. And for what? What did society gain from their retained wealth? Not jobs, not debt reduction, only more Wall Street gambling.

6. Financial elites pay lower taxes than their secretaries: Venture capitalists and private equity fund managers, as well as some hedge fund elites, get a fantastic tax break called “carried interest” that allows them to pay a top rate of 15 percent on their income (rather than the 35 percent top rate regular people pay). This tax break, originally designed for small business partnerships, has made the mega-rich even richer. You might be wondering why this outrageous tax break continues for billionaires. The answer is simple: these elites are pouring money into Washington to make sure that Republicans and Democrats alike keep the loophole in place. Even some liberal Democrats are parroting the line that this tax break for billionaires is good for America. So when the occupiers say they are disenfranchised, they’re right.

7. None of those who caused the crash have been prosecuted: Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund billionaire, is going to the hoosegow for insider trading. Bernie Madoff is in prison for life for his Ponzi scheme. And about 40 others have pleaded guilty to insider trading crimes. Yet none of these scoundrels, as immoral as they may be, had much to do with the financial crash. They didn’t peddle toxic mortgage-related securities. They didn’t push predatory loans. They didn’t rate garbage securities as if they were gold. None of these perps pumped up the housing bubble. Those who did are still roaming free, financially armed and dangerous.

8. Wall Street is much too big and its salaries are much too high: The financial sector is supposed to be an intermediary that turns our savings into productive investments. It’s not supposed to be a casino and it’s not supposed to dwarf the rest of the productive economy. But after years of deregulatory foolishness, it has metastasized to destructive levels. From the 1930s until the mid-1970s, financial sector employees earned the same as those in other sectors, relative to their skills and experience. That’s the way it should be. But since we embarked on the long march of financial deregulation and tax breaks for the super-rich, people working in the financial sector have seen their incomes skyrocket compared to everyone else. The bigger that gap, the more danger we face. And unless we build a massive populist uprising, it won’t change.

9. Wall Street still owns the regulators: When you put too much money in the hands of the few and when you deregulate finance, you get a financial casino. That’s what happened in the years leading up to the 1929 crash, and it happened again in 2008. During the New Deal we regulated the tar out of finance, ending their reign of speculative terror. And it worked for nearly a quarter of a century as financial crises virtually disappeared. Since financial deregulation reappeared over the last 30 years, there have been over 180 financial crises around the world. So you would think after 2008, we’d be back to reining in the bankers. But, no…our leaders are afraid to stifle “financial innovation” (See next point.) The Dodd-Frank bill is weak and getting weaker, thanks to intensive Wall Street lobbying. High government officials still believe that Wall Street can lead the nation forward. The kids are telling us that we should shut down the casinos now. Right again.

10. Financial innovation is a joke: Washington genuflects before the gods of financial innovation: the adjustable no-money down mortgages with resetting teaser rates, the synthetic collateralized debt obligations that turn garbage mortgages into AAA securities, the credit default swaps that are financial insurance policies without regulation, the nanosecond trading programs that flip millions of stocks per second while milking slower investors, and the myriad of ways to make enormous financial bets using little or none of your own money. They tremble at the thought of whispering anything that might stifle these highly profitable Wall Street inventions. They are wowed by trading measured in nanoseconds, by the alphabet soup of securities, by the dark pools of financial trading and most of all by financial billionaires and their lobbyists. But to paraphrase former fed chair Paul Volcker, the only real financial innovation in the last 25 years is the ATM machine. The rest are simply gambling games designed to enrich Wall Street's elites who pocket the winnings and pawn off the losses on us. The protesters sense the game is rigged. It is.

Does Wall Street pay or do we? In the end, it comes down to a clear-cut struggle between the few and the many. (There’s that 99 percent again.) Who is going to pay for the jobs we need? Who is going to pay for the debt that was created to bail out Wall Street and prevent another Great Depression? Wall Street wants us to pay in the form of cuts in Social Security and medical coverage, reduced wages and higher taxes (for everyone but them). In fact, they want the kids to pay by working longer before they retire (if they can ever find a job), paying higher medical costs as they grow older, and turning their Social Security accounts into Wall Street playthings no one can rely on. At the same time financial elites are arguing for fewer regulations and lower taxes on themselves and their fellow millionaires and billionaires. Financial interests are hoping we’ll simply forget who caused what and instead focus on debt, more debt and still more debt. They’re hoping we’ll blame government, regulations and taxes, while they laugh all the way to the bank – their banks. Some of us may be old and tired and fatalistic about all this looting, and sour about the chances for change. Thank god the kids still have their wits about them—and a fighting spirit.

Get out there and join them. And if you’re too old to stay overnight (like me), visit often and urge your unions, churches and community groups to join the fray. A progressive populist uprising only works when it’s large, vocal and full of spunk.

Go occupiers, go!