Occupy Nation: The Roots the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street Read online

  Here, in lower Manhattan, beats the heart of America’s business civilization. Through a circulatory system known as investment, wealth never rests, and as it moves it makes things happen in the material world, distributing enchantments and losses, performing over and over again capitalism’s historically unprecedented ceremonies of magic. Wealth and its promises flow into Wall Street in order to course again outward, then inward again, endlessly flowing, and along the way, building houses, heating them, furnishing them, wiring them, equipping them, sending in cement mixers and moving trucks, opening factories on distant continents, closing them, chopping down forests, drilling oil, mining coal, building wind turbines and solar panels, offering myriad opportunities to generate yet more capital to make more things happen.

  This whirling center of passions and calculations and deals is not confined to a few hundred acres in lower Manhattan (with neighboring precincts in New Jersey and Connecticut)—or to the webs that tie it to the competing centers in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. It is tethered to Washington. For the past three decades, those banks and insurance companies and financial divisions of other corporations were liberated to conduct their business more or less as they pleased because government regulations, put in place during the Great Depression in order to protect the public, were lifted. They were lifted at the behest of financial industry lobbyists and campaign contributors, and their economist collaborators who swept aside decades of obstacles in the belief that financial markets, like others, fundamentally regulated themselves, and that it would be integral to the self-regulatory process if investment banks, commercial banks, brokerages, and insurance companies were permitted to merge, so that savings and investment could be conducted under the same roof, an efficiency for financial capital that had been banned by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, one of the regulatory pillars of the New Deal. Wall Street has long been crash prone. Watered stock, unregulated investment pools, and easy money in margin loans (the equivalent of subprime mortgages) brought it to its knees in the twenties, then the conglomerate craze in the sixties. During the deregulatory years, which began in the late seventies, when Jimmy Carter was president, but accelerated at turbo speed during Ronald Reagan’s terms, as inventive financiers like Michael Milken and arbitrageurs like Ivan Boesky made fortunes with leveraged buyouts, nifty little “products” nicknamed junk bonds, and trading in inside information, Wall Street and Washington became the systole and diastole of America’s (and therefore much of the world’s) political economy. A system evolved in which the top financiers administered to themselves the rewards of self-dealing, squeezed through revolving doors, practiced deregulation and administrative collusion, organized themselves into combinations in the name of competition, all of this cheered on or at least tolerated by a larger public panicky about falling behind and convinced, more or less, that its own interests would be served too if capital were unleashed. Wall Street became, and, despite the economic crisis that some call the Great Recession, continues to be, the place where the action is: the rush, the buzz, the allure, the electricity. Capital might be an abstraction—no one has ever laid eyes on one fleck of it—but it was a potent one, for on its expectations contracts could be let, debts repaid, risks taken, vast organizations stood up and heaved into motion. For the mass murderers of al-Qaeda, Wall Street’s most conspicuous towers had been prime targets for their cinematic materializations of grandeur. Then, for a decade and counting, the missing World Trade Center, and the construction zones that loomed there, slowly filling up the spaces formed by the world’s tallest absence, would become the area’s chief tourist attractions. Wall Street was the canyon of dreams.

  Then, anticipated by no one, and yet with astonishing speed, as if bursting through the crust of a volcano long thought to be extinct, Occupy Wall Street erupted. It turned out there was another dream, this one circulating on Twitter: “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule,” with the hashtag #occupywallstreet.

  Within weeks the upsurge took on the feel of a popular movement, with its flare-ups of solidarity and blazes of sudden commitment, its improvisations and personal attachments, its incandescent compound of indignation, joy, outrage, hope, ingenuity, and resolve, its spikes of passion and wild ideas. As a moment in time passed into a movement in history, it astounded everyone, not least its participants, many of whom had long pined for a world-changing social movement in the interest of equity, some of whom had experienced such things themselves, or hoped against hope that they might do so someday, but had not dared think that a major eruption was possible now, never imagined how quickly it might be possible for a movement to take off, turning the homely verb occupy into a rallying cry and making “We are the 99 percent!” a household phrase. They were, as one of them put it, rebooting history.

  However, nothing comes out of nowhere. There are a few origin stories that converge, remarkably, in that zeitgeisty way in which people who don’t know one another sometimes get more or less the same idea at the same time. In February 2010, thirty-seven-year-old independent journalist David DeGraw posted on his own website a call for a 99 percent movement. “It blew up virally,” he says, and got picked up by Alternet, a major left-wing alternative news service. In January 2011, his site got knocked offline by hacker attacks—emanating from someplace unknown, he says—and since his service provider along with hundreds of other sites were also incapacitated, the provider declined to host his site any longer unless he graduated to a more expensive arrangement. When DeGraw put out a call for help, the network Anonymous came to his rescue and set up a new site for him. In March 2011, DeGraw and an Anonymous subgroup, operating together under the name A99, brazenly called for an Operation Empire State Rebellion on Flag Day, June 14. They would organize bank protests and close accounts.

  Meanwhile, New York City anti-austerity activists had been building up a critical mass since the spring. On May 12, several thousand marched around Wall Street, summoned by an online call from a coalition of small left-wing groups calling itself New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts (NYABC). It began:

  We hear it every day: There’s no more money. No money to keep our senior centers open, pay our teachers, serve the homeless or help college students graduate. There’s no revenue to pay for vital services or invest in creating jobs. Well, people across this country have had enough. There is no revenue crisis; there is an inequality crisis.

  Independently, on June 9, in British Columbia, the editor of the anticorporate magazine Adbusters, collaborating with a colleague in Berkeley, fixed upon September 17, 2011, as a good day to Occupy Wall Street, specifying “BRING TENT.” As was their insouciant wont—for twenty-two years, Adbusters had deployed design elegancies to campaign against not only advertising but against a society that turned advertising into its definitive art form—they Photoshopped a picture of a ballerina gorgeously poised on the back of the famous bronze statue of a hard-charging bull, that proud and ferocious shrine to Wall Street’s belief in itself. They launched their call where calls are launched nowadays: on the Internet.

  On June 14, without any known connection to A99 or the Adbusters call, NYABC—with the help of city employee unions and a group called Picture the Homeless—summoned about a hundred young activists and city workers to camp across the street from City Hall in the rain, protesting Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s budget cuts (including the closing of twenty fire stations) and proposed layoffs of teachers and social service workers. The unions pulled out after a day, not wishing to contend with the law, and Picture the Homeless left after a week. The activists called their encampment Bloombergville, after Depression-era Hoovervilles, and claimed inspiration from the occupations of public space in Madison, Wisconsin; in Tunisia and Egypt, and most recently, Madrid. After two weeks, a remnant group of thirteen was arrested trying to blockade City Council members who were preparing to vote on budget cuts. While Bloombergville lasted, it governed itself by a direct-democratic general assembly, meeting twice daily.
r />   Meanwhile, the night of June 13, A99 had declared that Operation Empire State Rebellion would occupy Zuccotti Park, a concrete rectangle taking up three-quarters of an acre located just north of Wall Street, and reconstructed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to include built-in low stone benches and tables, and a soaring, abstract bright-red Mark di Suvero sculpture, called Joie de Vivre, but generally known as the red sculpture. They would launch from there a nonviolent action of indefinite duration, with four demands:

  • End the campaign finance and lobbying racket

  • Break up the Fed & Too Big to Fail banks

  • Enforce RICO laws against organized criminal class

  • Order Ben Bernanke to step down

  Many grouplets call for many grand changes at many times and places. Came June 14, a grand total of sixteen people showed up at Zuccotti Park, formerly known as Liberty Plaza Park. DeGraw was one of four who were prepared to camp out. They had a tent and some folding chairs. The A99 group decided to try returning to Zuccotti Park on September 10. Some went off to join Bloombergville. When they found out about the Adbusters call for September 17, they decided to consolidate on that date.

  Meetings ensued, leading to more meetings—among them, an August 2 gathering on Bowling Green, and several five-hour-long general assemblies in Tompkins Square Park. Should they make demands? Adbusters said no. Those who gathered on Bowling Green had no idea what to expect. About the impending September 17 encampment, committed activists were “jaded and condescending,” says Pablo Benson, a twenty-nine-year-old sociology instructor from Puerto Rico with an MA from the New School. Some of his friends scoffed, “flipped it off.” He didn’t care. Nor did he care that the media didn’t care. He was one of those radical homesteaders later described by journalist Will Bunch: “people with quiet fantasies of a revolution and a communal lifestyle buried deep in their souls, stunned by the rapture of learning there were others who felt the same way, a discovery that only happened because of the rise of Internet social networking.”

  One organizer, Isham Christie, a Choctaw from Oklahoma with tight black curls and a trim beard, formerly cofounder of a revived Students for a Democratic Society at the University of North Dakota, lately arrived in New York as a graduate student and union organizer, inspired by the uprising in Egypt, wrote later: “Serious doubts plagued my mind . . . from the very beginning. Will people show up? Will Sept. 17 . . . be no more than a fight with cops? Will we be strong enough to actually take a space?” He “almost left the movement a couple of times.” He took heart from reading Nietzsche on the subject of cheerfulness.

  On the afternoon of September 17, Benson and Christie were two of several hundred who rallied across the street from the southern end of seventeenth-century Bowling Green, in front of the Museum of the American Indian. The fenced-in green is overstuffed with historical prefiguration. At its northern end stands the bronze statue of a bull in midcharge, icon of Wall Street rambunctiousness. The museum building also houses the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, something that the demonstrators might not have known, just as they were also most likely unaware that, in 1770, a two-ton equestrian statue of King George III was erected on the green, where it stood until five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, whereupon a band of Sons of Liberty toppled it.

  Now, on September 17, veterans of May 12 and Bloombergville were at Bowling Green aiming to topple other royalty. Most were surely aware of, and inspired by (that is, breathing in), recent precedents—the occupations of Madison, Wisconsin, back in December, of Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January, and of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, all directed against bankrupt political classes. Most shared a sense of occasion, theater, and disbelief. A group of students drove in from Oberlin College in Ohio, others came from Tennessee. A map circulated, listing three possible destinations. Listed first was the superblock known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza, which is privately owned, housing as it does the headquarters of the investment bank now known as JPMorgan Chase, the wealthiest bank—indeed, largest company—in the world; it holds, at this writing, $2 trillion in assets. However, the whole square block had been sealed off the night before by a steel fence. Presumably, there were police on the OWS mailing list.

  Plan B was to head for Zuccotti Park, which enjoys New York City’s curious designation, a Privately Owned Public Space, meaning that a real estate company received permission to build higher and more densely than usual in exchange for preserving a diminutive open space close by, open to the public in perpetuity. Thus Zuccotti Park, named for the US chairman of the Canadian-American owners, must, by law, be kept open, not subject to curfews, twenty-four hours per day. It was unfenced.

  Here, a few dozen marchers settled down for the night and declared that they stood for the 99 percent against the 1 percent. A likely inspiration was the Nobel-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz’s much-noticed article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” published in the May issue of Vanity Fair. Couching the issue this way was a stroke of messaging genius, since it turned the tables on right-wingers who insisted that any campaign for economic justice and progressive taxation amounted to class warfare. If the 1 percent were responsible for rampant inequality, then the status quo was not warfare at all, but a rout. The message left lots of questions and ambiguities, of course. Who were the 1 percent anyway? By one calculation, 31 percent of them were executives of nonfinancial corporations, and 14 percent of financial institutions; together, these business executives owned half of all stocks and mutual funds. Were the 1 percent rotten individuals? Was it right to hate them? Could a 1 percenter redeem him-or herself? Did Warren Buffett turn into a righteous 1 percenter when he said publicly that it was unjust that his secretary was taxed at a higher rate than he was? And then, too: Were doctors (16 percent) or artists and celebrities (2 percent) who belonged to the 1 percent as damnable as investment bankers or oil company CEOs? More profoundly, did the moral flaw lie in the fact that some individuals had acquired vast wealth, or that they had done so while obeying the dictates of perverse incentives that rewarded them for taking blind risks of driving the global economy into the ground? And even more pointedly, was good old-fashioned greed at fault, or was it the way in which this staple of deadly sins was encouraged to flourish and outdo itself in recent decades? Or was the real economic problem a sickness of institutions, the grotesque fact that society’s central decisions for allocating resources were made by the onrushing flow of capital that was bound to leave destruction, creative or not, in its wake; that these decisions were made by the dictates of a system that was indifferent to where the chips fell and on whom, a system that would corrupt saints?

  The night was cold. Some people slept, but Benson didn’t, although he had brought along a sleeping bag, New York not permitting the erection of tents in public. “The drum circle didn’t help,” he told me.

  Who were these scourges of the wealthy and powerful who rallied in Bowling Green and made their way to Zuccotti Park with much brio and without clear expectations? Even sympathetic observers struggled to get their minds around this blur of a phenomenon that so conspicuously failed to match their ideas of what a protest was supposed to look like and sound like. A visiting friend from Paris, veteran of decades of left-wing activity, looked at the massive demonstration of November 17 and said: “I have never seen a political movement that is so apolitical.” Right-wing journalists saw “goddamned hippies.” Demographically speaking, there were no reliable statistics, but by inspection the Occupiers were mostly young and mostly unemployed and therefore had time for encampments as well as a hunger for connection. One of them, Pablo Benson, twenty-nine, got specific. The key demographic that first night in Zuccotti Park, he thought, consisted of recent college graduates encumbered with huge loans. “You?” I asked. “Of course!” he shot back with a grin. Some in the original crowd belonged to the free-floating population of radical New Yorkers, many living in lower-rent areas of Brookly
n, veterans of one or another demonstration, some of them buddies, some strangers. They were mostly white: It might well have been a coincidence that Benson and Isham Christie were both sons of colonized populations. More than a few were artists of a downtown or Williamsburg disposition. They were the kind of people who, had they been in the audience when Bruce Springsteen shouted out his wake-up live-concert line, Is there anybody alive out there? over the years, would have thought, Yeah, good question—and at some point answered: The rest of the country may be dead, but I’m alive, and I know some other people.

  In later weeks, Occupiers would be heard to complain that they were met at first with a media blackout. According to Will Bunch, a top official at National Public Radio had justified an initial decision not to cover the protests in Lower Manhattan, insisting that there had not “been ‘large numbers’ of protesters; there have not been any ‘prominent people’ involved; there has not been any great disruption; (and) the protesters have failed to articulate a clear point or aim.”