Thousands of Americans Protest Bailout Plan

"We are going to get a package passed," Bush said at the White House. "We will rise to the occasion.

"There is no disagreement that something substantial should be done."

the most exciting event of the week, for foks like me who are more than a bit obsessed with citizen participation was the self-organized protests on Wall Street last night.  Sparked and coordinated by email, blogs and Twitter, hundreds of people arrived with their home made signs (which don’t look so home made anymore with new technology, do they?) to protest the proposed bailout.

Protesters said they want the Congress to protect millions of U.S. citizens who are on the verge of losing their homes due to bad lending practices of creditors instead of doling out public money to big investment firms responsible for ruining the economy.

"People are up in arms about this," Matt Holland of the TrueMajority.org, an advocacy group comprising 700,000 members that played a major role in organising the protests, told IPS. "Our members are livid. They're hitting the streets."

Yesterday afternoon NYC residents held a protest against the bailout yesterday on Wall St., one of many spontaneous protests held throughout the country, organized via blogs and email online. NY1 reports "The rally was one of 220 demonstrations in dozens of states across the country."

Several hundred protesters rallied against Bush's proposed bailout in Manhattan's financial district today. Protesters heaped their old magazines, vacuum cleaner hoses, knickknacks and other distressed assets under the back end of the iconic Wall Street Bull statue and offered to sell them to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. 

The motto of the day was, "Buy my shitpile," likely an allusion to Atrios's famous nickname for the subprime mortgage debacle. Protesters said they wanted a chance to sell their bad investments back to the government for millions of dollars, just like the Wall Street bankers.