Bloomberg invites protesters to stay

NEW YORK, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg invited Occupy Wall Street protesters to stay as long as they like -- providing they don't break any laws.

"The bottom line is -- people want to express themselves. And as long as they obey the laws, we'll allow them to," The Wall Street Journal quoted Bloomberg as saying Monday just before stepping off for the Columbus Day Parade. "If they break the laws, then we're going to do what we're supposed to do: enforce the laws."

The demonstrations are in their fifth week and have spread to 150 U.S. cities and Europe, ABC reported. The protesters are demonstrating against the richest 1 percent of the population, who hold 35.6 percent of the country's wealth, and what they see as Wall Street greed.

In Washington, hundreds of protesters were camped out just blocks from the White House and Capitol Hill, Politico reported.

"I think the country is very helpless," Brooklyn, N.Y., high school senior Leandra Villalobos, 17, told Politico. She said she had been participating in the Wall Street demonstrations but decided to go to Washington Sunday to help that demonstration get off the ground. She said though she doesn't blame President Obama for the country's current economic problems, "I don't feel like he's helping the situation out."

Maragaret Flowers, 48, co-organizer of the Oct. 11 movement, said the best thing demonstrators can do is make people aware of the problems facing average citizens.

San Diego police stood near City Hall and the Security Pacific office building to make sure the several hundred protesters camped out on the plaza kept their promise not to block entrances.

"We're going to stay cool, but we're definitely going to stay," Janet Douglas, a self-described "underemployed" college graduate who feels her generation is being victimized by Wall Street and "their political lackeys," told the Los Angeles Times.

On the Sunday talk show circuit, politicians weighed in on the protests.

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain accused anti-Wall Street protesters of being jealous of other people's money and turning themselves into victims.

"Part of it is jealousy. I stand by that," Cain told the CBS program "Face the Nation." "And here's why I don't have a lot of patience for that. My parents, they never played the victim card. My parents never said that we hope the rich people lose something so that we can get something.

"No. My dad's idea was I want to work hard enough so that I can buy a Cadillac, not take somebody else's," said Cain, a former chairman and chief executive officer of Godfather's Pizza and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Mo.

Fellow GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich told the program he regarded the protesters "as a natural outcome of a bad education system teaching them really dumb ideas," including "hostility to free enterprise and, frankly, a strain of hostility to classic America."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she considered the protesters to be appealing for corporate America to embrace "the most enduring American value -- fairness."

"I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street, the political establishment or the rest that change has to happen," Pelosi told ABC's "This Week." "We cannot continue in a way that is not relevant to their lives. People are angry."

The Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York Sunday paraded a shiny effigy of the biblical golden calf modeled after the iconic Wall Street "Charging Bull," an 11-foot-high bronze statue, symbolizing a Wall Street bull market indicating aggressive financial optimism and prosperity.

"It's a false idol, just as much as the Wall Street bull has been a false idol for so many of us for so long," protester Ed Needham told the New York Daily News.