The Occupy Wall Street Movement
On October 5th 2011, groups of people continued to gather in Zuccotti Park in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The movement wishes to express their discontent with the disparity between wealth and poverty in our country. Hundreds of people were either chanting with a human microphone, holding up their personal testimonies on cardboard signs, or assisting one of the many relief stations set up to support the protest. On this day, many Union members were set to march to demonstrate their full support of the movement, marking a new broad based support.
One of the many groups of people who have shown up today are a group of senior citizen women known as the, “Grannies for Peace.” Jenny, a 63-year-old social worker and a member of “Granny’s for Peace” stated, “It’s not what we’re hoping to achieve, it’s what everyone is hoping to achieve. I’m hoping this will be the end of this economic system.” The brilliance of this movement is that it has provided a way for everyone to participate to change something together. She went on to say, “I’m old enough to remember many times when people came together to march; like the Vietnam era. The biggest difference between now and then is that there is no generation gap here. ” Those at the protest who are over 30 years younger than the “Grannies” share the same desire to rectify injustices committed by the corporate grip on government.
Since September 1st, a variety of residents from all around the United States have responded to calls by a Vancouver nonprofit publication known as Adbusters and the hacking collective Anonymous. They requested all who were dissatisfied with the financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing effects of that crisis to peacefully protest in the financial district of Manhattan. Nearly a month later, the movement has gained momentum through its almost viral visibility online, the unprovoked arrests of protesters, and daily mainstream media attention. All of this has set off thousands of satellite protests in locations all over the world. The media attention to this movement and its broad appeal, which includes even some of those in law enforcement, has made it a force that no party or political ideology can ignore.
Genesis of the Movement
Drawing their inspirations from the Arab Spring movements, specifically the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt, Adbuster attempted to emulate these populist protests by employing the same methods to organize and raise awareness surrounding their movement.
On July 13, 2011 Adbusters issued a forum that generated the initial proposal to non-violently petition against the continued abuses of the financial system in place. As Raimundo Viejom, a student of Pompeu Fabra University, who synthesized the meaning of the occupation, said on an original Adbusters post, “Our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.” The Adbusters’ article went on to report that, “Wall Street, is the Financial Gomorrah of America,” and “… it will not change its practices on its own.”
Adbusters originally wanted 20,000 people to go to lower Manhattan to set up a communal center with a kitchen and tents and occupy Wall Street for a few months. A goal of gathering at Wall Street was meant to bring attention to the growing unevenness of the distribution of money in this country.
The first responses to Adbusters’ call for a change were from the New York General Assembly (G.A.), a compilation of city based activist groups with a joint vision for the movement, who met on August 2nd in Bowling Green Park to speak out against “pro-bank” and “anti-people cutbacks.” They met to establish a plan for the actual protest, which began on September 17th. Throughout August the G.A. had ongoing meetings to generate for solutions as well as calling for food donations. On August 13th, Adbusters confirmed that two offshoot protests had occurred in Spain and San Francisco and called for even more international movements to grow. Three weeks after this Adbusters post, protests had spread to London, Milan, Lisbon, Madrid and Athens.
Starting on September 1st a trial occupation for New Yorkers occurred in the financial district to perform a peaceful and legal demonstration in preparation for the actual occupation. When the 17th came, 5,000 people marched from Bowling Green Park to 1 Chase Plaza before the NYPD blocked their path. Following the police disruption the O.W.S. movement relocated to the privately owned Zuccotti Park to fully practice a nonviolent protest such as had been talked about three months before.
Reasons for Protesting (Economic Backstory)
The causes for Occupy Wall Street are rooted in economic problems that have plagued the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Eighty years later, the distribution of wealth in this country has not improved very much despite much social advancement. After the events of the Depression, the New Deal was instated and banks were regulated to prevent the type of risky investments that had caused the crash of 1929. This worked for a time, though most economists agree there were many causes in addition to New Deal policies that helped bring about relative economic stability after WWII. In response to another economic crisis in the late 70’s a new conservative president came to power and in the early 1980’s deregulated banking and commerce in unprecedented ways. This resulted in increasing the amount of loans distributed to customers who could never repay them as well as the trading of more derivative assets. By the 1990’s a Democratic president jumped on the deregulatory bandwagon. By then, consumer friendly banks gained the same abilities that had originally been designated to investment banks. The costs of purchasing a home waxed because people were buying houses without the money to repay the mortgages banks gave out. The mass inability to repay those loans caused the “housing bubble,” to burst in 2008. Aaron Isquith of Corcoran Real Estate Agency in Park Slope Brooklyn said, “It was insane in the early 2000’s. They were offering loans of over ten times the amount of annual income!” This practice resulted in former President George W. Bush passing the Troubled Asset Relief Program that would ensure the safety of banks and the corporations that helped maintain them. This bail out was almost completely paid for by the tax dollars of US citizens. Those in charge of these corporations and banks went untouched by this economic downturn.
The Current Status of the Protest
Since September 17th, the occupation at Zuccotti Park has become a fully functioning community center for those participating in the movement. Monica, a 25-year-old traveling musician said, “There are people who are good at cooking who cook for us. There are people who are very knowledgeable with medicine who are healing us. There are musicians who play for us. There are artists creating art. There are people who are good speakers who are helping us organize. So you see, everyone here is allowed to access their strengths and let that be their work.” This feeling is visible from the tents set up for the purpose of providing medicines and aid against the cold, a food station with a variety of donations of cold, hot, and dried foods, as well as speakers who hope to help shepherd a cause.
Media outlets and politicians such as Herman Cain and Michael Bloomberg have criticized the movement for its disorganization. Bloomberg stated, “What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base we have.” Bloomberg feels that the protesters opposition of banks is wrong because, “…if you focus on for example on driving banks out of New York City, you know those are jobs.” The mayor who is now in his third term has continued to show minimal support for the movement and on October 12th issued a mandatory cleanup of Zucotti Park. Presidential candidate for the conservative party and former CEO of Godfathers pizza Herman Cain asked on the Piers Morgan talk show, “What do the people who are protesting at Wall Street want from the bankers? Come down and write them a check? Go and get to the source of the problem.” Cain considers the source of the problem to be the government present at Washington DC who helped institute the financial bail out and not the banks who continue to provide Americans with jobs. Some politicians such as former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi genuinely admire the efforts of the protestors. She stated in a news interview on October 6th, “It’s independent…it’s young, it’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.” Besides positive and negative political responses to the protesters, the NYPD’s reactions to the movement have all been in staunch opposition of the movement.
On September 24h, NYPD officer Anthony Bologna was caught on video pepper spraying a crowd of people who were in the streets surrounding Zucotti Park without warning, and causing two young girls extreme amounts of visible pain in the process. First Amendment lawyer, Daniel Nazer commented that, “They were not being violent and it was just a non provoked attack. Sadly such things happen. Thankfully we have video, and now the police are being caught and the police report is not the end of the story.”
A statement by Fred Panpozi a 32-year-old unemployed occupier encapsulates the protesters’ feelings with a proud sense of optimism despite the vast opposition to his cause. “Everything here rose organically out of a chaotic state. Western society has been the experiment. It has always been about hypothesis first, then execution. We’ve been working pretty successfully, although it’s still a very crude organization. We’re trying to fine tune it because we threw ourselves into this situation and now we’re trying to find a system to emerge out of this.” The movement is growing and beginning to articulate more cohesive messages. It has spread geographically, but also, and more importantly, across the many lines within the 99% who are affected by the growing inequities in the system. No one can know all that what will come out of this protest and occupation, but its simple and salient message will continue to be a part of political dialogue through out the world.
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