“We are the 99% . . . You are the 99%.”
“Banks got bailed out / We got sold out!”
“Whose street? Our street!”
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This Is Not the Fringe.
This Is the Middle Class.
Yesterday into last night we gathered near New York’s City Hall and marched with what looked and felt like at least 100,000 “marginal fringe elements” such as nurses’ and teachers’ unions, the New York City Transit Workers’ union, the AFL-CIO, and innumerable others through Lower Manhattan to Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, the home base of Occupy Wall Street. We’ve been on numerous protest rallies in Manhattan and Washington and London with hundreds of thousands, and this felt as jam-packed as the anti–Iraq War marches in 2003, 2004, 2005.
But this—this feels like a revolution.
Yesterday’s marchers in the tens of thousands were nurses, teachers, professors, bus drivers, subway track workers, secretaries, students, at least one World War II veteran on an aluminum walker (according to the sign around his neck), many children on foot and in strollers, and so on. This is the middle class. As the signs and chants say, “We are the 99%. You are the 99%.”
Among the unions that announced their support and sent members to the march were National Nurses United, AFL-CIO (AFSCME), United Federation of Teachers, New York State United Teachers, Service Employees International Union, SEIU 1199, the Transport Workers Union, Transit Workers Union Local 100, Working Families Party, Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers, and Writers Guild East. (Click here for a longer list.)
A Few Things to Know about Occupy Wall Street
• Whatever you see on TV or read in the newspaper is probably a distortion, a minimizing dismissal, a marginalizing caricature. If you want the view of a seasoned journalist who has spent a lot of time with the OWS activists, read Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize–winning former New York Times reporter, at Truthdig and hear this interview with him. He describes the Occupy Wall Street activists as “the best among us.” See the video of Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Jeff Madrick, author of Age of Greed, talking with the Occupants last weekend through the “people’s microphone” (bullhorns are forbidden).
• The OWS organizers, a loose-knit, non-hierarchical network, are not fringey radicals, but mostly well-educated, social media–savvy young people, creative and resourceful, and organized. They have worked hard in school but there are no jobs. The system—both the economy down to its foundations and the government—is not working for anyone but 1%. It’s over.
• The Occupation was inspired by both Tahrir Square, Cairo, and the Arab Spring, and by Adbusters.org. See New York magazine’s revealing findings in “Meet the Occupants.” Learn more at OccupyWallSt.org.
• This Occupation is not limited to Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. Occupy Together lists meetups in 588 cities. L.A. Chicago. Philadelphia. Boston. Seattle. Albuquerque . . . Tomorrow, more. London, you’re next. See map below.
• The activists are not “unfocused” or lacking in specific aims. They have some very specific demands, including raising the tax rates on upper incomes; calling on the federal government to protect homeowners from arbitrary foreclosures by banks; establishing a financial transactions tax; and closing the “carried interest” and “founders stock” loopholes that, in the words of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “allow our wealthiest citizens to pay very low tax rates by pretending that their labor compensation is a capital gain.”
• Americans prefer Occupy Wall Streeters to Congress. New York magazine reports: “A new Rasmussen poll shows that 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Wall Street protesters, compared with the 14 percent or so who said the same about the legislative branch. A whopping 79 percent also agreed with what Rasmussen characterized as the movement’s main statement: ‘The big banks got bailed but the middle class got left behind.’ ”
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Do the Police Know We’re on Their Side Too?
Before the march got going, we asked a crew-cut, man’s man–looking fellow in a red CWA T-shirt, what would he and his fellow union members say to the police who have shown their dislike the whole Occupy Wall Street thing. (e.g., NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying women held within an orange plastic fence).
This union man said he and his union members would say, “We support you when you’re negotiating for a new contract. We’re there for you, and we expect you to be there for us. Just let us protest this unfairness and don’t give us a hard time.”
There were many people with press passes interviewing union members and taking down notes, and it seemed nearly everyone had a camera—at least an iPhone camera—taking pictures of each other’s signs.
The atmosphere was festive, though still charged, passionate, determined. Some chanted against police brutality, against racist police. This was no Obama kumbaya feeling as in 2008. That was so long ago. In the signs and the comments between fellow marchers (you chat as you walk, or when the march stalls), the people are pretty much as disgusted with the Democrats as with the other party. One sign said OBAMA = BUSH.
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Two views of the same E–W street (Ann Street?) from Centre to Broadway.
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We’re Peaceful, But Screw with Us and We Multiply
The NYPD seemed unprepared for the massiveness of the turnout. Once we got to walking, after the speeches very few could hear in Foley Square near City Hall, we were channeled into narrow Dixie straw–like passages on sidewalks or on the margins of the streets while large spaces of the streets were occupied by the white shirts and the regular blue-uniformed cops. At one point along an east-west street between Centre Street and Broadway (see above), we were held up, absolutely still, for five minutes or more. People started shouting, “The light says walk! The light says walk!” Others were chanting something indistinct but provocative against police. We were carrying a sign that read “We’re Peaceful, But Screw with Us and We Multiply,” and weren’t too comfortable being penned in among anti-NYPD chanters. Nearby were yellow signs saying “NYPD Protects and Serves the Rich.” Finally someone lifted the steel barricades and several dozen of us moved through across the street. Police yelled, “Stay on the sidewalk!” The cops didn’t like that freedom of movement and came running to slam the gates shut to keep the cattle penned in.
The videos of police violence later in the evening were doubtless instances of the crowds spilling out of the designated perimeter, the chain of steel barricades penning in the multitudes. (“Whose street? Our street!”) The talk among the crowds is that the police, the authorities want conflict, want confrontation—the media certainly do (“If it bleeds, it leads”). You can feel that they are on edge. They don’t like us, even though we are there for them, for all of us. The authorities want to know who the leaders are so they can decapitate the Occupation, but it’s dispersed, decentralized, like the Internets.
Around 7:30 we peeled off to take the subway back home. The marchers were still coming, about 8 to 10 abreast, down Broadway, pouring into Zuccotti Park at Liberty Place, holding up signs, chanting, beating drums. It was a beautiful sight. Someone said, “The French are here!” Across the street we saw a large white banner, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (photo below).
There is no telling where this is going, but we know it’s growing, and it’s spreading. There will be violent repression, and the movement will continue to grow. As they said in Madison, Wisconsin, “Screw with us and we multiply.” The popular uprising will give some backing to the president’s newfound populist push against the Republicans and put some courage in the spines of the Democrats to stand up against the rich, but in a way it’s too late. In the signs, the chants, the conversations, in the passion and conviction of the people marching toward Wall Street yesterday, you could feel that the people have already moved beyond the politicians, perhaps even beyond the old American economy and society as we’ve known it.
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Click here for Mother Jones’s interactive map of the anti–Wall Street protests spreading across America • inequality charts • Occupy Wall Street–NYC timeline • roundup of top coverage • and more. And see Further Reading sources below.
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close-up, Supreme Court, N.Y. County Clerk’s building (10-5-11)
Drummers on Broadway, St. Paul’s Chapel
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (“the French are here!” someone said).
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Further Reading:
See Timothy Noah’s fine and troubling series, “The United States of Inequality,” at Slate
See Pulitzer Prize–winning NYT reporter David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else
Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, et al., “Democrats Should Want This Tax Cut Debate”
Robert B. Reich, “Extend the Bush Tax Cut to the Bottom 99 Percent, But Not the Top 1 Percent”
Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future
Jacob Hacker, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Robert Scheer, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Steven Greenhouse, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker
Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity