OWS Final Draft

It was not so much the rain as the wind that wreaked havoc upon the blue and green vinyl tents that had recently sprung up in startling numbers inside of Zuccotti Square, one Wednesday afternoon in mid-October. Rather than retreat indoors, perhaps to the dry Starbucks around the corner, protesters weathered the storm in what could only be interpreted as a mark of smoldering defiance. They remained outside in the rain, sheltered inside of thin plastic ponchos and clustered underneath tarps.

Local news stations would later report that only half the usual number of visitors showed up that day to protest due to heavy rains. But in spite of a diminished crowd and uninviting weather, there was an unusual energy throughout the square. The handsome young star of a popular television show could be seen loitering contemplatively between aisles of tarp; towards the center of the square fights could be overheard breaking out between several restive protestors; at the park’s edges a few inveterate protestors remained stationed to their posts.

The rainy day marked just over a month since occupiers had first set up camp in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to protest Wall Street’s role in the escalating economic crisis, spawning the controversial Occupy Wall Street movement and capturing the attention of the worldwide media.

The protest, which officially began in New York City on September 17th before rapidly spreading to cities around the globe, was ignited by a radical proposal published in the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters over the summer. The proposal called for 20,000 protesters to assemble, “and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” in what the writers hoped would become a continuation of the protests that began during the Arab Spring earlier this year, and played a pivotal role in the Egyptian Revolution.

The provocative blog post stated, “The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”

The movement, which as of yet has not elected a leader or released a formal list of demands and has been praised and criticized in equal measure for its “headlessness” and lack of cohesion, is unified primarily by a shared sense of moral indignation both at the increasing economic class disparity throughout the United States, and at banking institutions who have been indemnified by the government for their role in the current economic collapse.

Kat Adams, a 27 year old street medic stationed near the Southwestern corner of the park, compared the struggles of the burgeoning protest to those of the Civil Rights Movement. “Civil rights, off the bat, was blocked at every corner,” said Adams. “Because they weren’t far enough into the mainstream.”

Adams said that the present goal for Occupy Wall Street right now is to get its message out.“Have you seen the movie Network?” he asked. When I replied that I hadn’t, he described a famous scene in the film where the frustrated protagonist, a news anchor, shouts on live television that he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. “We’re saying, ‘We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!’”


The very nature of the economic practices that led to our present crisis were, by necessity, over the heads of most people. According to Gregg Rule, Senior Vice President of the Portfolio Group and a Financial Advisor for MorganStanley and Smith Barney, it was precisely a lack of public knowledge about the economy and banking system that facilitated the financial crisis.

“Few people in this culture have even a rudimentary understanding of [economic] topics,” wrote Rule, in an e-mail. “The bankers want to keep it that way.”

It was perhaps this perpetuated ignorance regarding the economy that explained in part why media outlets were initially so uncertain about how to cover Occupy Wall Street. In the first few weeks of the movement many journalists were quick to declare that the protests seemed to come out of nowhere.

In hindsight, many financial experts have blamed collusion between the government and the financial industry to deregulate the economy for subsequent practices like increased speculation and reliance on derivatives such as CDOs that led to the subprime mortgage crisis and, inevitably, to the bailouts of major banking corporations.

"The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war,” wrote Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve — and the man who was labeled by many as responsible for risky lending practices that led to the housing crisis — in an editorial published in the Financial Times in March of 2008.

Later that year, in a congressional hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan added, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

To add further salt to the wound, a report released by Bloomberg News in November after the Federal Reserve unsuccessfully tried to prevent its publication, found that the bailouts were even larger than the public had previously been told. “Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system,” read the report compiled by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz. “—More than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”

On October 7th an article on Mashable reported that Occupy Wall Street had spread to 928 towns and cities around the world: from San Francisco, Des Moines, and Denver to global epicenters like London, Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The extraordinary proliferation of OWS has benefited enormously from social media and its ability to rally people together in service of political causes, a phenomenon Eric Augenbraun of the Guardian disparagingly referred to as “hashtag activism”.

Occupy Together, a website that describes itself as a “hub for all of the events springing up across the world in solidarity with the Occupy Wall St. movement,” and has been linked by Adbusters, occupywallst.org (and even received a Twitter mention from notorious documentarian Michael Moore) is one such example of how activists are using social media to coordinate protests efforts and streamline information. The website recently teamed up with Meetup.org to find, list, and update protest events.

“The GREAT thing about all of this, is that it’s completely in line with the whole idea of this decentralized movement,” read an announcement on Occupy Together. “Any single person can start an action in their area, and where one stands up there will likely be another to join you!”

But while social media may have alleviated the technical burdens of getting people together to protest, other complications are less easily remedied, such as the threat of group arrests and violent clashes with the police, which have occurred in many OWS offshoot sites.

The earliest and perhaps largest incident to receive national media attention was the mass arrest of 700 protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1st, most of which were for disorderly conduct. The NYPD claimed that they only arrested protestors who had wandered into the street and were obstructing traffic. However, many protestors, some of whom are now in pursuing a class-action suit against the city, claimed that they were herded onto the bridge by police officers where they were then effectively trapped—a common police tactic known as kettling.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, has been active in banning kettling in Washington, D.C., a practice she referred to as a case of trapping and detaining.
“You cannot arrest people without causing a crime; it is a complete violation of fourth amendment rights,” said Verheyden-Hilliard. “We’re trying to stop the NYPD from using the trap and detain tactic. We believe that people should have the right to demonstrate without the threat of false arrest.”

Jill Nelson, a journalist and activist who authored “Police Brutality” in 2001, described the kind of violent tactics used by the police against protestors as essentially par for the course, saying it did not surprise her. But Nelson asserted that such displays of police aggression are typically reserved for African Americans, and that the sudden redirection of violence towards young women, specifically young white women, indicates a significant shift.

“It says something profound about the desperate state of rage and alienation and violence,” said Nelson. “Ironically, the police violence, mass arrests, and overall ineptitude have done wonders for OWS in terms of getting the message and images out to a national and international audience.”

Politicians have become widely divided on the subject of Occupy Wall Street, with some, like Nancy Pelosi ,openly lauding the efforts of protestors, and others, like Bloomberg, citing the disruption to business as an unacceptable consequence.

"If you focus for example on driving the banks out of New York City, you know those are our jobs," said Bloomberg on his weekly radio show. “What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have.”

GOP hopeful Hermain Cain took a slightly more tactful approach saying that he sympathized with protestors who couldn’t find work, but that they needed to lobby in Washington, not on Wall St.

President Obama acknowledged the frustrations of protestors and the overall impact that the financial crisis has had on the American People, pledging to do his part to crack down on abusive practices in the banking industry. But he also invoked the important role banking institutions play in the economy.

We need them to help do what traditionally banks and financial services are supposed to be doing, which is providing business and families resources to make productive investments that will actually build the economy,” said President Obama.” But until the American people see that happening, yes, they are going to continue to express frustrations about what they see as two sets of rules.”