A global protest wave crested between 2009 and 2013

Evidence

Ever since reporter Rick Santelli called for a “Chicago Tea Party” live from the trading floor in February 2009 against Obama administration’s bailout plans, the Tea Party movement had been driving Republican lawmakers ahead of it, pressuring them to block Obama’s legislation and nearly pushing the United States into default in the summer of 2011. In October 2009, Italian comedian Beppe Grillo—who had already staged a first Vaffanculo (Fuck-off) Day in 2007 in protest of political corruption—founded the ideologically amorphous Five Star Movement (M5S) together with internet entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio. From December 2010, mass protests erupted in North Africa and the Middle East, beginning in Tunisia; in Cairo, demonstrators occupied Tahrir Square, and long-standing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February. In May 2011, demonstrations by the Indignados—the “outraged”—took place in cities across Spain, citing Hessel as an inspiration; at the same time, angry citizens in Athens protested on Syntagma Square against their government’s austerity policies. In mid-September, Occupy Wall Street protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. Four weeks later, activists set up camp outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. “People are waking up from their coma,” read one placard. At the end of December, Time magazine named “The Protester” as its Person of the Year. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 167

Categorization

• XREF: This compresses the entire post-2008 protest geography that ‘The Protester as Person of the Year’ frames; connects to the reader’s interest in why saturation produced so little durable change. Also resonates with the ADDENDUM ‘On Sacrifice’ theme only weakly — better kept as the raw temporal anchor for the periodization. — connects to: 2011 mass protests shared tactics across continents against the global 1 percent.; Over ten million people protested worldwide against the 2003 Iraq war invasion — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 123