By Mike Frick
On April 25, 2012, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) celebrated its 25th Anniversary by joining forces with Occupy Wall Street to demand a 0.05% tax on financial transactions to raise funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS. The small tax on Wall Street transactions and speculative trading (also known as the Robin Hood tax) could generate up to 400 billion dollars annually. A broad coalition of activists has called for this money to fund global public goods, including HIV/AIDS treatment, health services, and action against climate change. ACT UP, which emerged in the 1980s to break the silence on America’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, pioneered many of the direct action, non-violent protest tactics that have influenced the more recent Occupy Wall Street movement. Several hundred activists from ACT UP, Occupy Wall Street, Housing Works, and other organizations marched from City Hall to Wall Street, chanting “act up, fight back,” “housing is a human right,” and “we are unstoppable, the end of HIV/AIDS is possible.” Toward the end of the march, police caged demonstrators behind barricades in front of Trinity Church, one block from Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street’s former camp in NYC’s financial district. Earlier in the day, nine ACT UP activists dressed as Robin Hood were arrested for chaining themselves together and disrupting traffic outside the New York Stock Exchange. In a separate demonstration, the police arrested several protestors who set up a mock apartment in the middle of Broadway outside City Hall to call attention to homelessness and HIV/AIDS.
All images courtesy of Mike Frick, China Program Officer at Asia Catalyst.