“However, protest won’t be the answer to that. The answer is (for) governments to control their debts and deficits. I’m afraid protesting the streets is not going to solve the problem.
I feel that the bold part should read " Street protesting” or , “Protesting on streets”.
To my ears “Protesting the street” sounds like: Students protested the decision, in which “the decision” is the subject of something to protest about. But how about protesting the streets?
[Canadian Opinion:] “In the street” and “on the street” are both valid phrases, but they tend to be correlated with different things. One protests, riots, or dances in the street, but gossips, hands things out, or sells one’s body on the street.
I would think of “in the streets” as being directly atop the asphalt surface that’s meant for cars, while “on the streets” usually means right next to the street. One doing the things leahcim mentions as “on the street” is probably standing on the sidewalk, and one lives on such-and-such street, not in it.
I was thinking about that, but if someone says, “they’re rioting on the streets”, I think, “they’re rioting in the streets and he’s saying it funny” not “they’re rioting on the sidewalk”.
My impression of the difference is that “in the streets” emphasizes the conspicuous public display, while “on the streets” emphasizes the particular geography. I’d use “on the streets” if I was giving directions to the riot, or if I was correcting someone who thought they were rioting only in the privacy of their own homes.
Just to be contrary (no, not really), I’d like to propose that in this case, the problem isn’t the preposition or lack thereof, it’s the punctuation or capitalization.
I’m wondering if this article is referring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which case protesting the “streets” as in Wall Street might make sense–especially as an off the cuff, verbal remark. Wall Street being not so much the name of the street being protested, but as a nickname for the Financial District of New York and home of the New York Stock Exchange, and a metaphor for Big Business and Corporate Big Wigs and the like.
But I’m not sure how one would write that correctly, so that the meaning was clear.
In that case, though, it would be Street, singular, and probably capitalized; and even then “protesting against the Street” would be better. Whichever way you look at it, the original version, as quoted in the OP, contains either a grammatical error or (more likely) a typo.
They were demonstrating against the stress-tests that they think were unnecessary. They were telling the streets that “the banks are fit and you know it.”
