‘All we want to do is work, to be able to support ourselves. But thanks to the rich being greedy, we can’t even have that’

[Geee]

U K Independent :

In the line for the free bus from New York to Chicago, which will not only play host to this weekend's Nato summit, but also to a series of Occupy protests, an 18-year-old homeless boy called Sean has money to burn. Specifically, he has a dollar.

Sean touches a flame to the note and uses it to light a cigarette. "That's debt, and that's what we do with it," he says, grinning to his fellow Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It's one of those braggadocio gestures that probably has as much to do with the presence of an unfamiliar young woman as it does to hatred of the super-rich "1 per cent" whom this ramshackle global anti-capitalist movement set themselves against when they started camping out in Manhattan's financial district last September.

Smoke streams from Sean's fingers. He doesn't listen to other activists, who are already checking the internet on their phones to see if burning money is a federal crime. "I just hate money for what it did to my family," he says. Then it's time to get on the bus.

Funded by the union National Nurses United at a cost of $10,000, this coach is taking Sean, 40 protesters and me on a sweaty 16-hour journey to Chicago. The Nato summit will begin there in two days (after the G8 conference at Camp David, the presidential hideaway in Maryland), and city police have spent millions tooling up in anticipation of major protests against austerity and the global military-industrial complex.

Delegates are protected by ground troops, riot cops. The so-called 99 per cent have a ragtag bunch of high school college drop-outs, wide-eyed activists and war veterans, who spend the journey live streaming to their Twitter followers and making makeshift defensive weaponry out of bits of old junk.