My Advice to the
Occupy Wall Street
Protesters
Hit bankers where it hurts
October 12, 2011 8:00 AM ET-->
Protesters with the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement demonstrate in New York.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
I've been down to "Occupy Wall Street" twice now, and I love it. The protests building at Liberty Square and spreading over Lower Manhattan are a great thing, the logical answer to the Tea Party and a long-overdue middle finger to the financial elite. The protesters picked the right target and, through their refusal to disband after just one day, the right tactic, showing the public at large that the movement against Wall Street has stamina, resolve and growing popular appeal.
But... there's a but. And for me this is a deeply personal thing, because this issue of how to combat Wall Street corruption has consumed my life for years now, and it's hard for me not to see where Occupy Wall Street could be better and more dangerous. I'm guessing, for instance, that the banks were secretly thrilled in the early going of the protests, sure they'd won round one of the messaging war.
Why? Because after a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.
That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.
No matter what, I'll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement's basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on. But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:
1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.
2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.
3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can't do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.
4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.
5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company's long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.
To quote the immortal political philosopher Matt Damon from Rounders, "The key to No Limit poker is to put a man to a decision for all his chips." The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they're never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table. If Occupy Wall Street can do that – if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness – it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement. All it has to do is light a match in the right place, and the overwhelming public support for real reform – not later, but right now – will be there in an instant.
This story is from the October 27, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
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Troy Davis Park, which was until two weeks ago known as Woodruff Park, sits at an odd angle on Peachtree Street and Edgewood Avenue – two of the main thoroughfares in downtown Atlanta. A little more than a century ago the area where the park stands became ground zero in the 1906 race riotthat claimed dozens of black lives and scarred the black business district that once thrived there. Most days now it serves as an overlooked municipal greenspace near Georgia State University where homeless people gather and street vendors hawk tourist merch. That is until two weeks ago when Occupy Atlanta arrived with a multitude of tents. It’s now where young activists began organizing media and medical camps, and where the space has been unofficially renamed in honor of a man murdered by the state of Georgia a month ago.
Last week, Atlanta Mayor (and my Howard University classmate) Kasim Reed issued a deadline that Occupy Atlanta had to evacuate the park by 5 p.m. this past Monday. For his part, the mayor was in an uncomfortable position – faced with complaints from local business owners, he was contemplating arresting peaceful activists in a city that built its reputation as home to the most famous peace activist in the world.
An hour before the deadline roughly 200 people were camped out, the grounds dotted with tents, information tables and clusters of young activists sitting cross-legged in circles. On the northern end representatives from the AFL-CIO, a few local affiliates and a cross-section of labor rights organizations took turns explaining why it was crucial for their groups to support the Occupy movement. A few hundred feet away a group of college-aged activists were singing improvised protest songs and an elderly man shouted semi-coherent declarations about his grandfather, racism and white people in general.
Aside from the spectacle, though, Atlanta was its rush-hour normal and the only official presence were the widely loathed parking enforcement officers who found a windfall in ticketing people who’d come out to observe the demonstration. By 5:15 it was clear that Occupy ATL had been head-faked by the mayor, who extended the deadline for their exodus from the park.
Had Reed gone forward with his threat to evict the protesters we might’ve seen a photo negative of the civil rights movement, one in which a black police force arrests white protesters who are demanding that the nation heed its own conscience -- and doing so just two days after the Martin Luther King Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall.
That Bull Connor moment might still be in the offing, but Mayor Reed did issue a statement saying that civil disobedience was a crucial part of the city’s history. The activists got to put one in the win column.
Yet for all the symbolic importance of Occupy Atlanta remaining in the park, their victory managed to underscore the reasons for my basic distrust of the movement. Five years ago, the city enacted stringent laws directed at the homeless population -- most of whom are black -- downtown. Had any of the homeless who mingled among the activists on Troy Davis Park attempted to sleep on the grounds out of necessity, not political symbolism, they would have been quickly evicted or arrested.
Thus, there are a few ways to look at the (mostly white) Occupy Atlanta, but it can't be overlooked that much of their success lies in who they are, not what they stand for. No big city mayor wants news cameras showing images of labor organizers or white college students being dragged into police cars. I suspect that a movement that is purportedly about chastening the over-privileged has itself banked on that very privilege.
Consider that the national unemployment level is now roughly what theblack unemployment level was during the economic boom. It’s possible to see the Occupy Atlanta, and by extension the many other Occupied Americas, as a reaction of white people momentarily experiencing conditions that have become permanent realities for black people. And while anyone with a sense of current events welcomes the public finally demanding accountability for the rogue money men who’ve plunged us into an economic tailspin, its worth asking what will happen when the economy recovers for the rest of the country and black America resumes its recession-as-usual conditions.
This is perhaps too cynical, but it’s certainly possible that, like the Tea Party, the Occupy movement coheres through a common but fleeting anger and thus people of color should keep an eyebrow firmly raisedregarding where our concerns fit in this situation.
But those thoughts were drowned out as the various Occupiers chanted, sang and bull-horned about the righteousness of the cause even as the rush hour-traffic began to dwindle. They settled in for another night in the park -- alongside the homeless men who had been there all along.
>via: http://www.loop21.com/content/rethinking-occupy-movement-atlanta
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By Guest Contributor Manissa McCleave Maharawal, originally published at In Front and Center
In the past few weeks friends and family from around the country have asked me, with a deep urgency in their tone: “What is it like to be there? What does it feel like? How would you describe it?” These questions throw me because, like any project of describing life as it happens around you, when you are very much in it, it feels impossible sometimes. And so instead of describing what Occupy Wall Street feels like I say: “It is all happening so fast, it changes everyday, it is overwhelming, I am tired but I am also excited again, I’ve made new friends, new lovers and new enemies, I couldn’t have imagined my life would be like this a month ago.”
When I said this to my friend Amy last week she laughed and replied, half-jokingly: “That sounds like the start of the revolution.”
“Not yet,” I replied “but we’re trying.”
But my inability to answer this question has been nagging at me: Why is it so hard to describe what it feels like to be part of this movement that is not really a movement, this moment, this space? Maybe the fact that it is hard to describe is part of its strength?
Here is the thing: Occupy Wall Street has changed a lot over the past two weeks. It has grown tremendously, garnered more and more media attention and seems to be staying put for a while. While two weeks ago I walked away from Liberty Plaza thinking of how beautiful and inspiring it was, but also worried about how long it will be there, now the terrain of questions have shifted, it isn’t: When will the cops kick us out? but How will we grow? How do we sustain all the people that have come here? Should we occupy somewhere else too? That doesn’t mean that the cops getting rid of us isn’t still a major concern, but simply that now we feel like we are semi-established in some ways, or at least in enough ways that we can sustain something.
That said, on Friday I realized how much I have grown attached to the actual space of Zucotti Park when we were threatened with eviction by Brookfield Properties, the private real estate company who owns the park. That day I woke up at 3am and made my way over to the park, anxious and deeply sad that it might all be over. Arriving at the park I saw friends, old and new, and we hugged in the chilly pre-dawn air, “I don’t want to lose all of this” I kept saying over and over again. “We won’t” they replied, “and even if we do we’ll build it somewhere else.”
We didn’t lose on Friday morning, and the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of people willing to stay in the park, refusing to back down even if the cops threatened arrest was powerful beyond what I can express here. The moment made me realize that the way that I feel about all this, and the way I talk about it, has shifted. All of a sudden I am using personal pronouns– this is “our” movement, “we” are worried about the cops kicking us out. I don’t know when this happened but at some point I started feeling some sense of ownership over this movement. And I’ve started calling it a movement. I’ve started saying things I never thought I would , things like “in the movement….”
As I wrote in my last post, I still think OWS is more of a space than a movement, a space of radical possibility, but I also think it is becoming something else. It is a space, but it is also a moment: a moment in which radical critique of our political and economic systems and the harm they have caused, a critique that many of us have had for a while, feels possible to have on a larger scale. It is a moment in which people who never thought they would be out on the streets protesting are protesting. And this is revolutionary in itself.
1So what does it feel like to be part of Occupy Wall Street, to be there everyday almost? In some ways it has become an addiction, I wake up some mornings telling myself that today I won’t go by, that today I will take the day off and go back to being a graduate student. But somehow I find myself there, either to go to a working group meeting, a working group sub-committee meeting, to attend a training, to go on a smaller march, to see a performance, to hear and be a part of what is being discussed in General Assembly that night, or just to hang out at the margins and observe what is happening for a few minutes. There is the celebrity watching aspect to being in that space, as all the leftist intellectuals and left-leaning pop culture icons make their stop-by (a conversation I had with a friend: “I saw Deepak Chopra last night” “well I saw Talib Kweli tonight” someone else chimes in: “Neutral Milk Hotel a week ago was my favorite”).
But this is not what is addictive about being there. What is addictive about being there is that this space, this moment, this movement, suddenly has me thinking about things in a new way. It suddenly has me hopeful again. And it has me excited to think about my own, and all of our, potentialities and possibilities. Everything feels possible again. I never thought I would feel this way.
And I’m not the only one- like I said above, I’ve made new friends, good friends, friends all of a sudden I can’t imagine my life without. And I’ve made the occasional new enemy, the kind of enemies that you see at smile and nod at but know that you share different theoretical views, different personal views, different perspectives. This enemies are necessary too for without them the space wouldn’t be what it is: a place of frustration sometimes but yet hope and expectation too.
But what does everyday life look like at OWS? This is hard to describe because it changes depending on what time of day you are there, what day of the week it is, what the weather is like, who is there, what is happening there. It can seem both incredibly chaotic yet incredibly organized. It can seem underwhelming yet overwhelming. Sometimes it seems like just a bunch of people standing around holding signs or sometimes it looks like groups of people milling about, sitting on the stairs, on the ground, sleeping on top of tarps. But look more closely: what these people are actually doing, what this space is actually doing, is shifting the terrain of our imaginations. These bodies in this space are inherently challenging.
More pragmatically though:
You can hear OWS before you see it now. If it is during the evening General Assembly, which can last for hours, you can hear the voice of hundreds of people talking in unison, amplifying one person’s words so that everyone can hear them- the General Assembly has grown so much in the past two weeks that now the “People’s Microphone” needs 2 and sometimes 3 waves through the crowd so that everyone knows what is going on. I get chills every time I see this process in action- something about the way it makes everyone listen, repeat and really take on what someone is saying. You can also hear the drum circle on the west side of the square that has hundreds of people playing in it, dancing around it, the rhythm they make bounces off the walls of the office towers around the square and reverberates throughout the square. And above all this you can hear the general din of hundreds of people in one space together: talking, debating, arguing, or just sitting with friends and being in that space together. Every time I bike towards Occupy Wall Street, dodging cars and buses and taxis on Broadway, my heart starts beating a little faster when I hear this din, I start biking faster and I can’t wait to just be there. To hear what is being discussed in that night’s General Assembly, to meet my friends, to attend a meeting or just to wander through and see what there is to see, make a new sign, or browse through a book in the library, eat something from the food station or just generally observe the beautifully overwhelming spectacle of it all.
A few nights ago I was there around 10pm when it was drizzling and everyone was getting under their tarps and sleeping bags and settling in for the night. I was with a friend from out of town who is trying to start up Occupy New Orleans (read about that here). She is also a street medic, so we made our way over to the medic’s station, someplace I have only wandered by but never stopped at. The medic’s station is impressive in that you can smell it before you see it: it smells of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. And indeed while we were standing outside of it they were disinfecting and washing down their entire area, scrubbing the concrete and all the surfaces clean. The medic we spoke to was slow speaking and one of the calmest people I have ever met.
“Oh yeah we’ve had to deal with some serious stuff,” he said, “but this is one of the best teams I’ve come across.” He went on to describe how they had doctors and nurses on call, a whole team of street medics at all times, as well as access to low-cost or free clinics in the neighborhood. He offered help to Occupy New Orleans in whatever way he could, and together they brainstormed supplies and ways that OWS might be able to help.
Thinking about this moment of solidarity and support while winding our way out of the park around all these tarps with people’s feet poking out at the bottom of them made my heart swell for a moment. When I got home I joked to my roommate: “If you get sick, go to OWS, they have better free healthcare there then anywhere.”
And in part this is the point: that OWS is such a challenge to the state because it is, in many ways, functioning by itself. It is governing itself, it is feeding itself, it is making art, making music, reading a book, sitting on the steps and talking to friends, it is taking care of itself. This is radically different than a march or a rally, which have ending points. I realized this last week when after the big Wednesday march (which my friend Sonny writes about here), I got drinks with some friends, and we all sat around and talked both about how amazing the march was but then we also asked the inevitable question of “What’s next?” And as this question was being asked, I realized that it was the wrong question for OWS. It is the wrong question for a few reasons: because when we are reproducing everyday life we don’t need to ask “What’s next?” because this question is already answered. But it is also the wrong question because in a movement without leaders and without demands, the question isn’t “What’s next?” but rather: “What do I want to do next?”
The next day on the subway coming home from another evening at OWS (7pm General Assembly and then an awesome dinner from the food station: beans and rice and pizza and apples and ice cream and salad and macaroni and cheese. While in the food line someone came and made everyone sanitize their hands and then passed out plates and I felt so well-taken care of for a moment), the people I was with asked each other exactly this question: what do we want to see happen here, in this movement, in this space? The answers were varied: Z. wanted there to be more occupations, C. wanted there to be walking tours of banks, A. wanted more dancing and singing, I wanted to re-write the declaration. This moment felt so different than the night before, and this difference matters because it is the difference between endings and beginnings.
Occupy Wall Street is not an ending, it is a beginning.