From Craig Kanalley of The Huffington Post

The Occupy Wall Street movement has spread around the world in recent days. It has led to clashes with police in Melbourne, violence in Rome and massive protests. Protests in the U.S. have even shown hints of conflict in recent days.

China is watching developments carefully and doesn’t want the movement to spread to its nation. An Occupy China Facebook page has already sprung up, along with other chatter on the topic.

The latest development: Chinese authorities have blocked phrases with the word ‘Occupy’ on the popular Chinese microblog Sina Weibo, China Digital Times reports.

“As a Chinese internet company, we will continue to abide by Chinese laws and regulations,” a Sina spokesman said earlier this year.

The following phrases are among those blocked, per China Digital Times:

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From NBC News

More than one-third of the country supports the Wall Street protests, and even more — 58 percent — say they are furious about America’s politics.

The number of angry people is growing as deep reservoirs of resentment grip the country, according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll.

Some 37 percent of people back the protests that have spread from New York to cities across the country and abroad, one of the first snapshots of how the public views the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. A majority of those protest supporters are Democrats, but the anger about politics in general is much more widespread, the poll indicates.

“They’ve got reasons to be upset, they’ve got reasons to protest, but they’re protesting against the wrong people,” Jan Jarrell, 54, a retired school custodian from Leesville, S.C., says of the New York demonstrators. “They need to go to Washington, to Congress and the White House. They’re the ones coming up with all the rules.”

“Occupy Wall Street” has been called the liberal counterpoint to conservative-libertarian tea party, which injected a huge dose of enthusiasm into the Republican Party and helped it win the House and make gains in the Senate last fall.

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From Henry Blodget of Business Insider

Last week, we published a chart-essay that illustrates the extreme inequality that has developed in the US economy over the past 30 years.

The charts explain what the Wall Street protesters are angry about. They also explain why the protesters’ message is resonating with the country at large.

Here are the four key points:

1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression (with the exception of a brief blip in the early 1980s).

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From Jake Bialer of The Huffington Post

How does Occupy movement describe itself?

Using a word cloud generated by the Huffington Post we can easily see…

From Pam Martens of RedactedNews.com

Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of the New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the typical NYPD blue uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful, nonthreatening protestors attempting to take part in the Occupy Wall Street marches. Corporate media are reporting that these white shirts are police supervisors as opposed to rank and file. Recently discovered documents suggest something else may be at work.

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

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From Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com

When I first wrote in defense of the Occupy Wall Street protests a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that much of the scorn then being expressed by many progressives was “grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates.” Since then, even the most establishment Democrats have fundamentally changed how they talk about the protests — from condescension and hostility to respect and even support — and The New York Times today makes clear one significant factor accounting for this change:

Leading Democratic figures, including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama, are embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment see the movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s powerful House fund-raising arm, is circulating a petition seeking 100,000 party supporters to declare that “I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests.”

The Center for American Progress, a liberal organization run by John D. Podesta, who helped lead Mr. Obama’s 2008 transition, credits the protests with tapping into pent-up anger over a political system that it says rewards the rich over the working class — a populist theme now being emphasized by the White House and the party. The center has encouraged and sought to help coordinate protests in different cities.

Judd Legum, a spokesman for the center, said that its direct contacts with the protests have been limited, but that “we’ve definitely been publicizing it and supporting it.”

Politico similarly noted today that “the White House wants to make it clear that President Barack Obama is on the same side as the Occupy Wall Street protesters.”

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From Michael Tracey of Mother Jones

Another day at #OccupyWallStreet, another round of violence committed by the NYPD.

On Wednesday afternoon, tens of thousands supporting the nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement participated in a march from Liberty Plaza, the permanent site of the New York City demonstration, to City Hall, and then back to the plaza. Attendance figures were bolstered by a strong showing from organized labor—many members of the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU 1199, Transportation Workers Union Local 100, and other unions were on hand. (Big Labor has played a significant role as the protests have grown.) Throughout the day, protesters danced to the music of roving marching bands, debated one another, and reveled in the sight of ordinary citizens taking over the entirety of Foley Square, deep in the heart of Lower Manhattan. The daytime events went forward without known incident, but a few hours later, things turned ugly.

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From Azi Paybarah of Capital New York

Here is a letter to Azi Paybarah of Capital New York:

We need to take this movement seriously as symptomatic of the brewing unhappiness of a generation that is becoming more and more hopeless about our economic future.

Because the federal government hasn’t been able to generate a real job creation program yet, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo need to lead on this issue and creatively put New Yorkers back to work on rebuilding our infrastructure, our transit system and our dilapidated public schools. Perhaps they could create a modern WPA for New York in the 21st century.

And I suggest that the growing group of peaceful protesters on Wall Street should start a new political party: the Coffee Party, which would give them political clout to change government policies and advocate for good schools and good jobs in the future.

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