“Arun Gupta was enraged as he learned the details of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to fix the U.S. banking system with $700 billion in taxpayer funds. The 43-year-old copy editor and freelance journalist, who publishes his own alternative newspaper, The Indypendent, needed to channel his angst but couldn’t find a live protest to attend. So on Sept. 22, he sent an e-mail to some politically active friends in New York. Within days, they’d planned a protest against the bailout in New York and at 80 other locations in the U.S. on Sept. 25. ‘I couldn’t sit back while this plan gets rammed through Congress,’ says Gupta. ‘We live in a digital world, but change has to happen in an analog world. We married the two — the Internet helped us organize like wildfire.’ Gupta, now working with the online organization truemajority.org, says he expects hundreds and possibly a thousand protesters to converge at the protest near Wall Street. Protesters plan to build a pile of ‘citizen junk’ that the government should also purchase in front of the iconic bull sculpture. … The Internet is now swirling with petitions, debates bordering on rants, and biting satire about Paulson’s plan and its potential consequences. The calls to arms come from across the political spectrum-from right-wing enemies of taxes to libertarians and left-wing progressives.” (09/25/08)