Following The Money: Sustaining The Protesters And Police On Wall Street

The Wall Street protest is about the influence of money in American society. In fact, the person literally on the money, George Washington, took his presidential oath of office on Wall Street.

Whenever hundreds of people gather for any purpose, it takes dollars to sustain them in different ways. First, they need protection from the NYPD, which is also monitoring the demonstrators in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District.

Commissioner Ray Kelly has confirmed that the cost of police overtime to patrol the park is $2million so far. He pointed out in a recent news conference that because the number of NYPD officers has shrunk by 6,000 in the last four years, he has no choice but to use officers on overtime for protection, crowd control and what the NYPD calls disorder control.

That $2 million price tag translates into just over $70,000 per day in overtime, which is paid for by taxpayers, and is approximately $20,000 more than the median yearly salary for a New Yorker. It's still an open question as to how many more days the protesters will fill the Lower Manhattan park, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out during a news conference Monday.

"I have no idea how much longer." Mayor Bloomberg said. "People want to express themselves, and as long as they obey the laws, we'll allow them to."

Demonstrators agreed that there is no set end date for their protest, which means that policing them will cost more tax dollars from you and from a source that may not immediately come to mind: Wall Street itself.

Wall Street firms account for 13 percent of New York State tax revenues and 7 percent of New York City tax revenues. That means that for every ten or eleven cops working at the protests against Wall Street profits, one of them is being paid for by Wall Street profits.

In addition to tax revenues, private donations are being spent for the now month-long demonstration called Occupy Wall Street. In the northwest corner of Zuccotti Park, volunteers take in hundreds of parcels each day from Occupy Wall Street supporters.

"This one's [from] Portland Oregon, Pennsylvania, Kentucky…" a volunteer at the receiving center told PIX11 News as she pointed out different boxes. Occupy Wall Street web volunteers directed supporters to send donations to the nearest UPS store, where other volunteers pick them up and deliver them to the park. The parcels' contents are not screened.

Also, there is a 24-hour food center in the middle of the park, where volunteers serve all comers, and the quality of the food is high. PIX11 has observed stacks of hot pizza, gourmet breads, case after case of high-priced energy bars, and every non-alcoholic beverage imaginable.

"A lot of people just feel this is an important movement and they want to support as much as they can," a volunteer named Carlos told PIX11 News, adding, "last week, someone sent a pizza from Europe."

To be precise, the donor had ordered the pizza from a local New York pizza parlor, which delivered it to the protesters. One Financial District pizza restaurant, Liberatos, has reportedly sold hundreds of pies that were delivered to demonstrators.

At least one major corporation has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Ben and Jerry's has set up a demonstration support page on its website. The Vermont ice cream maker is a division of Unilever, which is one of the 150 largest corporations in the world. Ironically, part of the international corporate structure that thousands of protesters are demonstrating against is now supporting those demonstrators.