The Occupy Wall Street movement, which has now been going on for more than a month, received support from some local groups who held a demonstration in front of the post office on Broadway in Monticello on October 11.

About 30 people turned out for the event, including 21-year-old Catherine Rivas, a student at Sullivan County Community College, who lives in Hurleyville. She brought a couple of signs she had made, one of which said, “Don’t get spanked by the banks.” She said she had also used the signs the previous weekend at one of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Manhattan.

She said, “I was so happy to see so many young people there, and to see everyone get together. I’ve never protested before, and I feel really strongly about everything that is going on,” regarding the economy and the banks.

Thomas Brown, a member of MoveOn.org, who lives outside of Woodbourne and who organized the Monticello demonstration, said, “We think that banks are like cars; they’re fine, you just need to regulate them; you need a speed limit. There’s a speed limit for cars, there is regulation of cars; we need regulation of banks.”

Allan Rubin, another demonstrator, said, “This isn’t going away. This is a serious attempt to get rid of many of the things that have plagued us since the end of the Bush Administration.”

Alan Gerry, the legendary founder of Cablevision and the force behind Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, had a decidedly different take on the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, which has sparked similar demonstrations in hundreds of cities across the country and around the globe.

Gerry spoke at a Pike County Chamber of Commerce dinner in Matamoras, PA, on October 11. According to an account in the Pocono Record, Gerry said of the Manhattan protestors, “I didn’t see a lot of real people out there. I don’t think you saw people who were out of work on the street. It was people collecting welfare checks and frustrated trust fund babies.”

He said the movement would lose steam and the occupiers would go home once the cold weather sets in.