With No Future Visible, Young Activists Have Few Options but to "Occupy Wall Street"
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.
But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.
Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"
It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.
Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".
The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.
When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.
We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.
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AMY GOODMAN: Yes, it's day 10 of the Occupy Wall Street campaign. On Saturday, more than 80 protesters were arrested as hundreds took part in yet another march to Wall Street. The New York Police Department used nets and physical force to break up the crowds. Videos uploaded to YouTube show officers pepper-spraying protesters in the face from close range, punching demonstrators and dragging people through the street.
Since Saturday, September 17th, thousands, inspired by popular uprisings from Spain to the Arab Spring, gathered near Wall Street to decry corporate greed. On Sunday, protesters issued a communiqué calling for the resignation of the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and a dialogue with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Ryan Devereaux and Jon Gerberg of Democracy Now! were in the streets talking to people about what took place.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER: There were some arrests down in the Wall Street area, including someone from the media team, around Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. There was a mass arrest. As many as a hundred, perhaps around a hundred, were taken in, in police vans, in city buses. And then those who remained came down. There were reports of pepper spray being used, people being dragged around on the ground by their hair. The witness reports are still coming in.
YELL: My name is Yell. This one police officer had whipped out his mace and sprayed it about a foot away from me and around my area, where there were other people. The mace at that point was so close to me that it was dripping down my face, down my chest, all over me. It was ridiculous. I was about maybe 45 to an hour—I was blind for about 45 minutes to an hour. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. They need to do a lot more to move me.
CHRISTINA GONZALEZ: My name is Christina Gonzales. I'm from Far Rockaway, Queens. Today I was involved in the protest. I was actually arrested. The guy told me to stop filming. I told him I wasn't, and I heard him say, "Get her!" The next thing you know, they all came up behind me. They grabbed me by my wrist. They took their feet and swept it under my feet to try to take my feet from under me. They put the cuffs on really tight. I could not feel my hands. And all I kept doing was screaming, "Please get these cuffs off of me! Get these cuffs off of me! I cannot breathe! I'm suffocating! My hands!"
We sat inside one of these police vans, 16 of us, for two-and-a-half hours with the doors closed. We couldn't breath in there, and there was a man in there who needed medical attention. He had a big, huge laceration on his eyebrow. There were a couple other brothers who had scrapes on their leg, big cuts into their leg. And everybody was just laughing at us. The cops kept circling around. We asked for water. No water. We had our phones. We were sending pictures; we were making phone calls. We even called 911, and 911 said, "You're with the cops, they're there to protect you," and she hung up the phone on me.
There's a lot of—there's a lot of causes out here, but I think the main thing that we're looking for is that we're human beings, and human beings should come before money. Human beings should come before profit. There's a lot of greed out here, and a lot of people don't have things, and there's a few small people who do have it, and they're keeping it from us. And they've got the cops out here to protect them, and they should be out here protecting us, you know? That's why we're out here, because there's injustice going on. And everybody wants to know, what's our cause, what's our cause? Listen, this is not just a protest. This is a struggle. It's a fight. It's a war going on. And we're fighting a peaceful war.
WYLIE STECKLOW: I believe, as a constitutional lawyer, that the actual act of being here, of doing two general assemblies a day, of doing two marches a day, and of trying to have this peaceful assembly, putting out cardboard signs that other individuals will come around and see, this whole act is expressive speech. This is the First Amendment. It's a living, breathing moment of the First Amendment in action and something that I don't recall really seeing quite like this before.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER: What they're doing here is the assembly. The core demand, I think, right now, seems to be the right to organize, to have a political conversation in a public space, to show Wall Street, so to speak, what democracy looks like.
AMY GOODMAN That was Nathan Schneider, editor of the website wagingnonviolence.org. He talked about the protest over the last 10 days.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER: This protest began on Saturday with a rally down near Bowling Green and then a march up to a surprise location, which turned out to be Liberty Plaza. Since then, people began spending the night, that first night. Every day since, there have been interactions with the police, generally including arrests. There's been a lot of frustration about media coverage. But what matters more is that this group is learning the skills that are necessary in order to build that kind of coverage and build that kind of presence in the media.
HENRY JAMES FERRY: My name is Henry James Ferry. The media center is a—it's a varied group. It's made up of people who are live streaming through a handle of "Global Revolution." It's made up of people like me, who are tweeting from "The Other 99." That's my handle, "The Other 99." I also have a Facebook account that's putting up the list of our media events at "We are the Other 99." And we want to be a primary source of information. This is day eight of the occupation. We want to create a narrative that the media can use to tell this story. Right now, this is a very messy, disconjointed story, and I don't think the media knows how to cover it. We're trying to create that narrative so that they have primary information, sourced with pictures, with video, with sources that they can trust, so they can go out and tell the message to the whole country and the whole world.
AMY GOODMAN For more on Occupy Wall Street, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. And organizers in Los Angeles have now just announced an Occupy Los Angeles campaign.
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