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The ousted chief of Olympus, the Japanese camera-maker under investigation for hiding investment losses for years, is confident about making a comeback _ a return he vows will clean up the company’s scandal-tainted management for good.
Michael Woodford, the former President and Chief Executive at Olympus Corp., said Thursday he was lining up investor support and talking to other “influential people in the Japanese establishment” for his return to the company.
Woodford, in town this week for such meetings, declined to give specifics, saying the discussions were “delicate.” But he was clearly upbeat about the prospects, noting he had enough support to call a general shareholders’ meeting _ a key move for managerial change.
“I wouldn’t be doing this. I wouldn’t be putting myself through this enormous physical and emotional effort if I didn’t think it could be successful,” he told The Associated Press, weary but flushed from the bustle of reading email from Olympus employees cheering him on.
“This is uncharted territory. You have the world looking at this story,” he said at a Tokyo hotel.
The deception at Olympus, dating back to the 1990s, to hide 117.7 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in investment losses became known only when Woodford blew the whistle. He questioned exorbitant fees for advice on the acquisition of British medical equipment maker Gyrus Group and other expensive acquisitions in 2008.
Woodford recalled that he thought the Gyrus purchase was unwise and unneeded at the time, but said he never dreamed it involved anything illegal.
Woodford, a 51-year-old Briton and a rare foreigner to lead a major Japanese company, was fired in October after confronting Olympus directors.
Woodford is demanding the resignation of the entire board, including President Shuichi Takayama, who replaced him and initially declared all the spending as legitimate in a news conference.
“It’s offensive to common sense,” said Woodford.
The battle over who will lead the camera and medical equipment maker and its 40,000 employees could come to a head at the next shareholders’ meeting. Takayama said Thursday that might be held in March or April.
Olympus met its deadline to avoid being removed from the Tokyo Stock Exchange by filing corrected earnings for the April-September first half and for the past five fiscal years on Wednesday.
But it is still under a criminal investigation, and could be delisted later on.
Olympus appointed three outsiders to a new reform committee Thursday to beef up governance and present a plan to shareholders. The committee is in addition to an earlier panel announced by Takayama, which is investigating the scandal.
The Olympus fiasco has prompted soul-searching in Japan Inc. on living up to global standards. Ruling and opposition legislators met with Woodford earlier this week to hear his ideas about governance.
The company’s loss of 32.3 billion yen ($414 million) for the first half of the fiscal year, through September, a reversal from a 3.8 billion yen profit the same period a year earlier, was mainly from the economic downturn and losses from Thai flooding, Takayama said.
“Capital adequacy ratio is a big problem, and we are considering how we can overcome it,” Takayama told reporters. “We are considering various options, including a capital tie-up and operational or sales tie-ups.”
Woodford said he was opposed to alliances, which he said would likely compromise Olympus’ independence, and he had better ways to get capital to shore up its hobbled balance sheet.
“Because of the strong cash flows and profitability of the medical business, we could raise funding from additional sources without losing our sovereignty,” he said.
Olympus should focus on core businesses _ medicine, microscopes, industrial products and cameras and other consumer products _ and stop acquiring unrelated companies, such as pet food, plastic plates and cosmetics, he said.
He promised a more transparent Olympus, with more outside board members. He said he was preparing the candidates already.
Olympus stock, which plunged after the scandal hit, has recouped some of the losses but dropped 21 percent to close at 1,041 yen Thursday.
A third-party panel set up by Olympus, including a former Japanese Supreme Court judge, released the findings of an investigation earlier this month, which said top executives who were “rotten to the core” had orchestrated the accounting cover-up spanning three decades.
The fees for financial advice and overvalued acquisitions were part of an elaborate deception utilizing overseas banks and several funds to keep the massive losses off the company’s books, according to Olympus. Japanese magazine Facta was first to report the dubious money.
It is still unclear if Woodford will manage a comeback.
Some people, such as former board member Koji Miyata, see him as a hero and have begun an online campaign to bring back Woodford.
Miyata says Woodford, a 30-year employee at Olympus, was groomed from the start to lead the company.
“There are a lot of senior managers who might be good for the No. 2 post, but someone who is destined to be No. 1 is totally different,” he said in a recent interview with The AP.
“He has principle. He is uncompromising,” he said of Woodford, whom he has known for 25 years. “He isn’t swayed. He doesn’t avoid confrontation. He sticks to his guns that what is wrong is simply wrong.”
Woodford, who sees himself as a “salaryman,” denied it was his nationality that might make him Olympus’ savior.
“I’m sure there are some Japanese people who could do similarly to me,” he said. “I know the company. I’ve worked there. It doesn’t matter if I’m English or Japanese, in that sense.”
Plastics maker Spartech Corp. cut its loss for the fourth quarter in half.
Clayton-based Spartech reported a loss of $27.7 million in the fourth quarter that ended Oct. 29, or 90 cents a share, compared to a loss of $55.7 million, or $1.81 a share a year ago.
Spartech produces plastic sheet, compounds and packaging products. Sales of higher margin products for transportation and construction customers helped Spartech’s sales increase 13 percent in the quarter, to $293.2 million, compared with $259.6 million a year ago.
For its 2011 fiscal year, Spartech posted a loss of $21.1 million, compared with a loss of $50.4 million in fiscal 2010.
Working almost to exhaustion and persuading countries one by one, European leaders agreed Friday to redefine their continent _ hoping that by joining their fiscal fortunes they might stop a crippling debt crisis, save the euro currency and prevent worldwide economic chaos.
Only one country said no: Britain. It will risk isolation while the rest of the continent plots its future.
The coalition came together in a marathon negotiating session among the 27 European Union heads of government _ hard bargaining that began with dinner Thursday evening and ended after 4 a.m., when red-eyed officials appeared before weary journalists to explain their proposed treaty.
It was a major step forward in the long, postwar march toward European integration. It was two decades ago, on Dec. 9 and 10, 1991, that European negotiators drafted a treaty in Maastricht, Netherlands, to unite their politics, create a central bank and, one day, invent a common currency.
The agreement _ with 23 countries in favor and three more saying they are open to the idea _ would force countries to submit their budgets for central review and limit the deficits they can run.
A crisis over sovereign debt that consumed Greece and spread to Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain threatened to explode into a worldwide financial crisis capable for forcing the global economy into recession.
“This is the breakthrough to the stability union,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. “We are using the crisis as an opportunity for a renewal.”
To prevent excessive deficits, countries in the treaty will have to submit their national budgets to the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, which will have the power to send them back for revision.
They must also bring their budgets close to balance. Except in special circumstances, the budget deficit of a country must not exceed 0.5 percent of gross domestic product, the amount of goods and services produced by its economy. An unspecified “automatic correction mechanism” would punish the rule-breakers.
Germany and France insist that fiscal union is the best way to regain market trust, badly shaken by the escalating financial crisis. Most economists think it will not be enough.
They say the euro countries need to have enough money on hand to guarantee everyone can pay their debts. Euro leaders put off until March a decision on whether to provide money on top of a euro500 billion, or $668 billion, bailout fund for euro countries.
European leaders did agree to add euro200 billion to the International Monetary Fund to help ailing countries.
Only 17 of the 27 European Union countries use the euro currency, and its stability has been threatened by the massive national debts of some of those 17. All but two of the non-euro countries _ Britain and Denmark _ are committed to adopting it eventually.
The countries that use the euro found they had friends among those that do not. At least six and as many as nine non-euro countries are willing to bind themselves to the euro countries in a pact aimed at having their economies converge.
Britain said no for two reasons: Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party includes a strong anti-EU element, and Cameron, despite trying deep into the night, failed to win an exemption from regulation for the British financial industry.
The other leaders would have none of it: Bankers and lack of regulation are viewed on the continent as a prime cause of the financial crisis.
“What was on offer is not in Britain’s interest, so I didn’t agree to it,” Cameron said. “We’re not in the euro, and I’m glad we’re not in the euro. We’re never going to join the euro, and we’re never going to give up this kind of sovereignty that these countries are having to give up.”
Britain, which prides itself on its fierce independence, joined the then-European Economic Community in 1973 _ only after French President Charles de Gaulle, who had vetoed the U.K.’s membership along with Germany’s leader, fell from power.
Since then, it has retained a frosty skepticism toward the ambitions of France and Germany to forge ever closer political and fiscal ties. It eschewed both the euro single currency and the Schengen open borders policy, fearful of losing power to determine its own fate.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy blamed the British leader for scuttling what could have been an EU-wide treaty. He said Cameron’s exemptions for British finance “seemed to us unacceptable.”
Some countries may face parliamentary opposition to the pact, which would allow for unprecedented oversight of national budgets.
Stocks and the euro climbed on the news of the treaty, even though it offers only a long-term solution and leaves many details to be worked out. Stocks rose 3.4 percent in Italy, 2.5 percent in France and almost 2 percent in Germany. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 1.5 percent and vaulted back over 12,000.
Borrowing costs for European countries fell, but only slightly, a sign of cautious confidence from the bond market. The yield on the benchmark Italian government bond fell to 6.33 percent, down about 0.05 percentage point. A yield above 7 percent is considered unsustainable.
One by one through the long night, the leaders of the 17 euro nations persuaded the non-euro nations to come along.
Hungary, the Czech Republic and Sweden said they would need to consult their parliaments. The six other EU countries that use currencies other than the euro _ Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania _ agreed right away. The leaders want the treaty written by March.
The countries hope to help European nations tame their long-term debt. Such an agreement is considered necessary before the European Central Bank and other institutions commit more money to lower the borrowing costs of heavily indebted countries like Italy and Spain.
How exactly that will happen remains unclear. Financial markets around the world had hoped the ECB would buy massive amounts of national bonds, flooding the market with money and lowering borrowing costs. But ECB President Mario Draghi dashed those hopes Thursday and said there was no plan to buy more bonds.
On Friday, Draghi called the treaty agreement “a very good outcome for the euro area, very good.
“It is going to be the basis for much more disciplined economic policy for euro-area members,” he said. “And certainly it is going to be helpful in the present situation.”
A breakup of the euro would have disastrous consequences. It would almost certainly trigger a financial crisis while banks figured out who owned what and while countries leaving the union awkwardly transitioned back to their own sovereign currencies.
Such a disorderly exit could cause banks to become fearful and stop lending money to each other. In 2008, a credit crisis followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers investment house and triggered a meltdown in the stock market.
Peabody Energy Corp. on Wednesday announced that it has increased its stake in Australia’s Macarthur Coal Ltd. beyond 90 percent — the threshold beyond which it can force remaining shareholders to sell their interests.
The announcement means St. Louis-based Peabody now has full control over the mining company, ending an 18-month quest. It also means Peabody will pay out an extra $100 million, bringing the total value of the acquisition to almost $5 billion.
Peabody last month promised to sweeten the offer slightly, to $16.40 a share from $16.14, to help increase its stake beyond 90 percent, giving it fuller control of the company.
Acquiring 100-percent of Macarthur “brings clear strategic and financial benefits,” Gregory H. Boyce, Peabody’s chief executive, said in a statement. He said the company “looks forward to completing operational improvements, accelerating the realization of synergies and advancing Macarthur’s growth pipeline.”
Queensland-based Macarthur controls 270 million tons of coal reserves and operates mines that produced about 4 million metric tons last year in the face of severe flooding that restricted output.
The additional sales volume is small for Peabody, which sold almost 250 million tons of coal worldwide last year. But Macarthur is the world’s largest exporter of pulverized injection coal — a commodity that’s in high demand from steelmakers. The bulk of Peabody’s sales volume is lower-priced coal that’s burned for electricity generation.
The acquisition also continues Peabody’s rapid expansion in Australia, a coal-rich country nearer to energy hungry China.
Peabody failed in an effort to gain a controlling stake in Macarthur last spring, offering as much as $3.8 billion. In July, the company made another bid with a minority partner, steelmaker ArcelorMittal, which was already a 16-percent shareholder.
Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal dropped out and agreed to sell its interest to Peabody after China’s Citic Resources, Macarthur’s largest shareholder, agreed to accept the cash takeover offer, giving the suitors a majority stake.
Peabody recently sold $3.1 billion of notes to help finance the acquisition.
Qantas Airways planes returned to the skies Monday after an Australian court ruled on a bitter labor dispute that had prompted the world’s 10th-largest airline to ground its entire fleet.
A flight from Sydney to Jakarta, Indonesia, took off shortly after Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority gave the “Flying Kangaroo,” as the Australian flag carrier is known, the all-clear to resume flying.
Qantas said in a statement it still expected some delays as it worked to clear the backlog of customers affected by the nearly 48-hour grounding. The airline is adding extra flights and expects its schedule to return to normal within one or two days.
The grounding disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of people across the world, and Qantas passengers were gathering at airports in Australia, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the hopes of finally getting to their destinations.
The airline’s resumption of flights comes around 12 hours after an emergency ruling by an arbitration court ended weeks of strikes and canceled a staff lockout.
The court ruling was a major victory in the airline’s battle with unions representing pilots, aircraft mechanics, baggage handlers and caterers, whose rolling strikes have forced the cancellation of 600 flights in recent months, disrupted travel for 70,000 passengers and cost Qantas 70 million Australian dollars ($75 million).
But some aviation experts said the surprise grounding of all 108 planes on Saturday, at a cost of $20 million a day, has hurt the Australian flagship carrier’s reputation around the world. Moody’s Investors Service said it could downgrade the airline’s credit ratings as the weekend’s events could hurt bookings, profits and the value of the Qantas brand.
Still, the stock market welcomed the weekend developments as allowing the airline to focus on its long-term strategy. Qantas shares on Monday jumped 4.3 percent to AU$1.61 on the stock exchange in Sydney.
Henry Harteveldt, an airline industry analyst in San Francisco, predicts the shutdown will do long-term damage to the Qantas name by hurting its reputation for reliability.
“A lot of travelers won’t take a chance and will book away to Virgin Australia, Air New Zealand and other airlines,” Harteveldt said. “Brand loyalty in the airline business is very low, and there is so much competition.”
Before the court ruling, Virgin Australia said it was scheduling extra flights and offering 20 percent fare discounts to help stranded Qantas passengers through Thursday.
If Qantas loses customers, that could also hurt partners in its alliance of global airlines, including American Airlines. A rival alliance that includes Air New Zealand and is led by United Continental Holdings Inc. could benefit, as could a third group of airlines that includes several major Asian carriers and is led by Delta Air Lines Inc. and Air France-KLM.
CEO Alan Joyce praised the court ruling, which prevents unions from taking any further strike action over their demands for pay hikes and job security clauses under news contracts being negotiated. The strikes have been blamed for a sharp decline in the airline’s future bookings.
“The important thing is that all industrial action is now over and we have certainty,” Joyce told reporters in Sydney.
“We will be returning to business as usual over the next 24 hours,” he said.
Other industry veterans said the lockout was a daring move that will pay off for Qantas, which wants to expand the low-cost, low-fare model that it uses at its Jetstar Airways subsidiary business cards design.
Jetstar has extensive routes to Southeast Asia and Japan, and lower costs than Qantas. But Qantas unions fear that expansion of low-cost airlines will result in Australian jobs being sent overseas. Joyce hopes to bend the unions closer to the company’s vision for growth by tapping into Asian markets.
“It was a very shrewd move by their CEO to force the issue and stop the potential deterioration of the brand,” said Mo Garfinkle, an airline consultant who has worked for Qantas rival Virgin Australia. “In the end, it will benefit Qantas financially.”
Garfinkle said the short duration of the fleet grounding will help Qantas get back up to full speed quickly, cutting its losses.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday described the grounding as “extreme,” while Transport Minister Tony Albanese has sharply criticized Joyce for giving the government only three hours notice of his plans.
The Australian government, angered by a lack of warning of the grounding, had called an emergency court hearing on Saturday night to end the work bans for the sake of the national economy.
The three judges heard more than 14 hours of testimony from the airline, the government and unions. Workers have held rolling strikes and refused overtime work for weeks out of worry that some of Qantas’ 32,500 jobs would be moved overseas in a restructuring plan.
The unions wanted the court to temporarily suspend the employee lockout so that strike action could resume if negotiations in the labor dispute failed to progress. But the airline said the strikes had devastated the airline’s reputation for reliability and that the threat needed to be removed permanently before customers would return.
Tribunal President Geoffrey Giudice said the panel decided that a temporary suspension would still risk Qantas’ grounding its fleet in the future and would not protect the tourism and aviation industries from damage.
Qantas is the largest of Australia’s four national domestic airlines, and the grounding affected 108 planes in 22 countries.
About 70,000 passengers fly Qantas daily, and would-be fliers this weekend were stuck at home, hotels or airports, or even had to suddenly deplane when Qantas suspended operations. More than 60 flights were in the air at the time but continued to their destinations, and Qantas was paying for passengers to book other flights.
Qantas infuriated unions in August when it said it would improve its loss-making overseas business by creating an Asia-based airline with its own name and brand. The five-year restructure plan will cost 1,000 jobs.
The airline also said in August that it had more than doubled annual profit to AU$250 million but warned that the business environment was too challenging to forecast earnings for the current fiscal year.
Qantas is the 10th-largest airline in the world by passenger miles flown, according to the International Air Transport Association, an airline trade group.
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Associated Press writers David Koenig from Dallas, Texas, and Andrew Dalton from Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Enterprise Holdings’ revenue rose to $14.1 billion for its 2011 fiscal year, a record for the privately-held company and a 12 percent increase from 2010.
Clayton-based Enterprise’s brands include Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent a Car. Its fiscal 2010 revenue was $12.6 billion.
For its 2011 fiscal year that ended July 31, Enterprise grew its daily rental fleet by nearly 10 percent, to more than one million vehicles, the company said in a statement payday loans guaranteed no fax. The company had more than $2 billion in corporate travel revenues for fiscal 2011.
Enterprise, which is owned by the family of founder Jack Taylor, does not disclose profit figures.
Forget style, quality and customer service. This holiday season, all that matters is price.
A week before Halloween and two full months before Christmas, stores are desperately trying to outdo each other in hopes of drawing in customers worn down by the economy.
Wal-Mart, the biggest store in the nation, joined the price wars Monday by announcing that it would give gift cards to shoppers if they buy something there and find it somewhere else cheaper.
Staples and Bed Bath & Beyond have already said they will match the lowest prices of Amazon.com and other big Internet retailers. Sears is going a step further, offering to beat a competitor’s best price by 10 percent.
“The days of marketing the stuff in your store because it was a hot brand are over,” says Dave Ratner, owner of Dave’s Soda & Pet City, a Massachusetts pet food and supplies chain.
For the holidays, Ratner plans to offer 20 percent off pet accessories if customers buy a bag of dog food. Customers, he says, just want a deal.
Almost four years after the onset of the Great Recession, they’ve learned to expect one too. In better times, retailers could afford to keep prices higher and use promises of higher quality and better service to lure people into stores.
Those days are over. In a recent poll of 1,000 shoppers by America’s Research Group, 78 percent said they were more driven by sales than they were a year ago. During the financial meltdown in 2008, that figure was only 68 percent.
Wal-Mart last year went back to its “everyday low prices” roots, a bedrock philosophy of founder Sam Walton, rather than slashing prices only on certain items to draw in customers. Now everyday low prices might not be low enough.
So it’s trying something it is calling the Christmas Price Guarantee. It works this way: If you buy something at Wal-Mart from Nov. 1 to Dec. 25 and find the identical product elsewhere for less, you get a gift card in the amount of the difference.
The deal excludes online prices and some categories of merchandise _ groceries, live plants, tobacco, prescription drugs and wireless devices that require a service agreement. But it is good even if weeks pass between your purchase and spotting the better deal. And it applies even to big items like TVs, for which prices can drop steeply as Christmas approaches.
Duncan MacNaughton, chief merchandising officer for Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores, told reporters Monday that he has noticed “much more promotional intensity and gimmicks” among competitors.
“This gives customers peace of mind that we are an advocate for them,” he said.
Toys R Us’ big book of holiday offers will be packed this year with $8,000 of savings, compared with $5,600 last year, said Bob Friedland, a company spokesman. And it has added an incentive this year: If customers who sign up for its loyalty program spend $200 or more during the holiday season, they will get coupons on toys every month next year.
Retailers are responding to a customer base that is better informed, and more comfortable shopping online, than ever.
Jenna Wahl, a cardiac nurse from Bloomington, Ind., said she expects to spend about as much on holiday gifts this year as last _ roughly $500 _ but will try to get more for her money.
She’ll be asking stores to do more price-matching and plans to use her iPhone to check prices and download coupons.
“I will take things back in order to get the better deal,” she said.
Wal-Mart left online prices out of its Christmas offer, but other stores have decided they may not have that luxury. Staples, for example, is leaving it to the discretion of its store managers to decide whether to match online prices.
Sears’ offer of beating a competitor by 10 percent will not apply to retailers that only do business online, such as Amazon, but will apply to prices that its brick-and-mortar competitors offer on their websites.
The holiday price wars mark an acceleration of a trend that has already swept the retail industry. Lowe’s, the nation’s No. 2 home improvement store, said in August it was starting to focus on everyday low prices for items that customers can easily comparison-shop at rivals like Home Depot and Sears.
And J.C. Penney, the department store chain, said earlier this month that it plans to overhaul its pricing strategy starting in February. So far, it has kept the details a secret.
Wal-Mart stepped up its price matching in April by directing store employees to comb through competitors’ advertisements so price matches at the register would be easier. Wal-Mart’s price match has been around for several years, but it is using it more as a competitive weapon to compete with rivals. It’s launched ads playing up its price matching and has training sales associates to better police prices of local competitors. Customers will still have to ask for the price match.
“Customers have learned to wait on the next big deal because they know that if they wait long enough they can get a lower price than the everyday low price,” Bob Gfeller, Lowe’s executive vice president of merchandising, said to investors in August. “However, we must be vigilant to ensure that our customers perceive us to be priced competitively every day, even against online retailers and smaller category killers.”
Indeed, 64 percent of shoppers polled said that it would take discounts between 30 percent to 50 percent to get them to spend, up from 54 percent last year, according to a recent Citi Investment Research & Analysis survey of a little more than 1,000 customers. Customers looking for 60 percent off as a big motivator to spend increased to 10 percent from 8 percent last year, the survey showed.
Bill Martin, co-founder Shoppertrak, which monitors customer traffic at 25,000 stores nationwide, says retailers are seeing that customers appear in droves when they have big sales for holiday weekends like Black Friday, Memorial Day or Father’s Day. This creates peaks and valleys throughout the year, a trend that hasn’t abated since the recession began in late 2007.
“The reality is consumers are targeted. They’re well informed, and they’ve searched the Internet for price information,” said Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, which expects foot traffic to drop 2.2 percent during the holiday season compared with a year ago.
Folk music legend Pete Seeger and `60s folk singer Arlo Guthrie joined Occupy Wall Street demonstrators Friday in their campaign against corporate greed while residents near the protest park encampment pushed to regain some peace and quiet in their neighborhood.
Seeger joined in the Occupy Wall Street protest Friday night, replacing his banjo with two canes as he marched with throngs of people in New York City’s tony Upper West Side past banks and shiny department stores.
The 92-year-old Seeger, accompanied by musician-grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger, composer David Amram, and bluesman Guy Davis, shouted out the verses of protest anthems as the crowd of about 1,000 people sang and chanted.
They marched peacefully over more than 30 blocks from Symphony Space, where the Seegers and other musicians performed, to Columbus Circle. Police watched from the sidelines.
Occupy Wall Street began a month ago in lower Manhattan among a few young people, and has grown to tens of thousands around the country and the world. A recent Associated Press-GfK poll says more than one-third of the country supports the Wall Street protesters, and even more _ 58 percent _ say they are furious about America’s politics.
But the encampment at Zuccotti Park has become more than a tolerable nuisance, some neighborhood residents say. At a meeting Thursday, they complained of protesters urinating in the streets and beating drums in the middle of the night. Some called for the protesters to vacate the park.
The area’s community board voted unanimously for a resolution that recognized the protesters’ First Amendment rights while calling for a crackdown on noise and public urination and defecation.
U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and state Sen. Daniel Squadron said in a statement that the resolution was “an attempt to establish a sensible framework that respects the protesters’ fundamental rights while addressing the very real quality of life concerns for residents and businesses around Zuccotti Park.”
Asked about Occupy Wall Street on WOR Radio on Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the protesters’ leaderless structure has made it difficult to negotiate with them.
Occupy Wall Street spokesman Han Shan, who has served as a liaison between protesters and local elected officials, agreed the protesters needed to be better neighbors. Shan, who attended the meeting, promised to limit the noise.
At Columbus Circle, Seeger and friends walked to the chant of “We are the 99 percent” and “We are unstoppable; another world is possible.” Seeger stopped to bang a metal statue of an elephant with his cane _ to cheers from the crowd.
At the center of the plaza, Seeger and Amram were joined by Guthrie in a round of “We Shall Overcome,” a protest anthem made popular by Seeger.
After more singing, Seeger asked for a mic check to tell the crowd: “The words are simple: I could be happy spending my days on the river that flows both way-ay-ays.”
During the march, the younger Seeger, in troubadour fashion like his grandfather, walked among the protesters playing songs. Amra took up a flute and others enlivened the night protest with the sounds of the accordion, banjos, and guitars.
At the front of the throng, marchers held American flags and a large blue flag that said: “Revolution Generation … Debt is Slavery.” Along the way, the crowd sang protest songs made popular or written by Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and others of the protest era.
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Associated Press writer Karen Matthews contributed to this report.
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