Protesters Head for Uptown NYC in 'Millionaires March'
A group of protesters, including a number of anti-Wall Street demonstrators, headed uptown Tuesday for an afternoon march through the Upper East Side and past the homes of some of New York City's wealthiest residents.
Around 1:00pm local times protesters began heading north from 59th Street and 5th Avenue into one of Manhattan's toniest residential neighborhoods.
The planned route, for which the marchers do not have a police permit, would bring the protest past the homes of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, oil magnate David Koch, New York Private Bank and Trust chief Howard Milstein and hedge fund manager John Paulson.
Traffic buzzed around the entrance to Central Park less than an hour before the so-called "Millionaires March" was set to begin. A few hundred protesters -- with nearly as many personnel from media organizations -- had assembled, carrying signs with slogans that read "Millionaires should pay more" and "School Budgets get slashed to increase their stash."
Protest leaders said the event was in the works long before people began camping out at Zuccotti Park last month, and Tuesday's crowd was made up of some protesters up from Lower Manhattan, along with others from around the city who organized via MoveOn.org and elsewhere.
"We've been planning this for a long time, and I think it's bigger and stronger because of 'Occupy Wall Street'" said Michael Kink, executive director of the Strong Economy for All Coalition, an organizer of Tuesday's march.
Theo Pappas, who lives in Manhattan's Turtle Bay neighborhood, was readying herself to walk up Park Avenue. "Most of the country's wealth is in the one percent of the population, and the rest of us are out here dribbling," she said.
In something of a departure from the abstract agenda articulated by "Occupy Wall Street" protesters during more than three weeks of encampment at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, Tuesday's march is expected to highlight a concrete policy sought by protesters: an extension of New York's two percent "millionaires' tax," which expires in December.
News Corp. is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and NewsCore.