More than 100 protestors gathered on Bicentennial Mall on May 16 to “voice” their frustration with the North Carolina legislature by banging on pots and pans for 15 minutes straight. Groups such as the AFL-CIO, a federation of local unions, and the Raleigh-Wake MoveOn Council sponsored the Pots and Spoons Protest to allow citizens to speak out against government overspending and catering to rich corporations and the elite, according to them. Jeremy Sprinkle, communications director for the AFL-CIO, said the idea was based on cacerolazo, a popular form of protest in Latin American countries such as Chile and Argentina. “It consists of ordinary folks grabbing what they’ve got in their kitchen and walking outside their homes and communities at a given time and banging their pots and pans. It’s a call for attention,” Sprinkle said. “We felt it was time to bring the spirit of cacerolazo to North Carolina, where since the 2010 election, our out-of-control General Assembly has been working hard for corporate lobbyists and right-wing ideologues.” Sprinkle said this movement, called the “99 Percent Spring,” was inspired by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement. The Arab Spring began in 2011 when a protestor in Tunisia set himself on fire, “because it was the only thing he could do to get people to pay attention,” Sprinkle said. The Occupy Movement took hold in the United States shortly after, another example of a popular peoples’ protest. “I think the intention of the 99 Percent Spring was to carry over the message and the momentum and the passion behind Occupy Wall Street into the new year in a way that would keep activists invested, energized and excited about the possibility of making real and substantive change in the United States,” Sprinkle said. According to the protestors, 1 percent of the country controls almost all of the wealth, and the remaining 99 percent pays the price for that “inequality.” They did something simple – banging on pots and pans – but together created a cacophony that could be heard inside the legislative building. “I could see the smile across everyone’s faces. They were doing something special and unique and fun and they were making a statement that was so loud as to be impossible to ignore,” Sprinkle said. “For the people who were in the Legislature, it was impossible for them to pretend it wasn’t happening.” Heather Kilcrease, media organizer for the Raleigh-Wake MoveOn Council, said the legislature needs to open barriers to the people that are the majority. “For far too long we have had people in political power that are very disconnected from your average America and they no longer listen to the needs of the average American,” Kilcrease said. Kilcrease said activities like the Pots and Spoons Protest are slowly catching on, but it’s just the beginning of the movement. “I hope [the Legislature] saw the enormous crowd there and realized that for each action we’re a part of, it’s just going to get larger and larger. While corporate interests have money, what we have is people power – and no amount of money can really beat people power.” But not all the people at Bicentennial Mall that morning were joining the protest. Members of Americans for Prosperity, like State Director Dallas Woodhouse, passed out earplugs to bystanders and politicians to counter the sounds of banging kitchenware. “We are an organization that has been supportive of the General Assembly’s budget they passed last year,” Woodhouse said. “We think it required some tough medicine for the state at a time when the state needed it. It was important to us because it cut taxes, it cut spending, it cut out waste and it also added state funding for 2,000 additional teachers.” Woodhouse said the one thing the different groups sponsoring the protest have in common is they want more money out of taxpayers. “No matter how much money they get out of the taxpayer, they always want more. We were out there giving away earplugs. We want the lawmakers to both literally and figuratively drown out the hardcore, tax-raising left,” Woodhouse said. According to Woodhouse, the Legislature is moving in the right direction, but needs to continue focusing on strengthening the economy, especially for students. “We have people in majors over there at N.C. State that will graduate with no hope of getting a job because their major doesn’t teach them to do anything. I think the universities tend to be bloated when it comes to offices of diversity, and offices of all kinds of things that have no effect on whether people learn to be engineers or veterinarians or whatever else,” Woodhouse said. Kilcrease said it was fitting for Americans for Prosperity to pass out earplugs because in her opinion they represent big corporate interests. “It was kind of disgusting and appalling that they would do that to oppress what we were trying to say. It’s a gimmick to them. They make a joke out of real and serious issues by doing stuff like that,” Kilcrease said. She said Woodhouse was laughing the entire time of the protest. “It made me sick to the bottom of my stomach to see him shaking hands with lawmakers, with a smirk and smile reaching in his bin and passing out his fancy earplugs. I wonder how much that cost?” Kilcrease said. “If the right would just only stop reaching in their pocket to combat the left, and just give a little, then everyone would be happy.”