HENWOOD REPORT: Visiting the occupiers of Wall Street
Occupying Wall Street | Doug Henwood
Henwood
We—my wife Liza Featherstone and son Ivan Henwood and I—paid a visit to the Occupy Wall Street protest yesterday afternoon. Here’s an illustrated report. I also did a segment for my radio show. Audio for that is at the bottom of this entry.
The big media have largely ignored the OWS protest (though if you’re part of a certain kind of network on Facebook, you can’t miss it). Called first by Adbusters with only the most minimal agenda, it’s taking on a life of its own, as people trickle in from all over. And I do mean minimal—the agenda is supposed to evolve spontaneously. When I talked with one of the organizers last week, she told me that they merely hoped “to build the new inside the shell of the old,” and though that sounds seductively wonderful, I’m not sure how robust such an approach can really be.
Or, to quote the event’s Facebook page, named in the now-ubiquitous hashtag fashion (#OCCUPYWALLSTREET):
we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future
I don’t think that has Lloyd Blankfein trembling in his shoes. Not that I know what could make him tremble, aside from a few quarterly losses for Goldman.
When we got to Wall Street, a band of what appeared to be several hundred were conducting the “closing bell” march, joining in the traditional observation of the end of the trading day on the New York Stock Exchange. The dominant chant was: “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Here’s a glimpse of what it looked like, from the corner where George Washington was inaugurated for the first time.
It’s not often you see a quote from Ronald Reagan at an event like this, but the politics of the participants looked like a mixed bag, a topic I’ll return to.
This being New York, a healthy contingent of cops was on the scene.
At the corner of Wall and Broadway, things dispersed some, with some of the crowd (including us) heading towards the base camp, Zuccotti Park at the corner of Broadway and Liberty, not far from the “Freedom Tower” (under construction). Here’s what the park looked like from the Broadway side.
Within, one quickly encountered familiar iconography, e.g., this U.S. flag with corporate logos in place of the stars (photo by Ivan Henwood).
Posters promoting the event, exhibiting that Adbusters style that’s a reminder that Judith Butler was so right to say that you have to inhabit what you parody.
The crowd was a mix of locals and migrants. I chatted with people who’d come from Missouri and Maine to express frustration and show solidarity. (They’re on the audio segment.) The woman from Maine was unemployed for a year and willing to stay as long as anyone else is there—through January, if that’s what it takes. But I also talked with locals from Brooklyn and Queens. Onlookers and passers-by were neutral to friendly—there were no jeers except some aimed for a lone and odious anti-Semite.
Principles were being worked on in standard “consensus” fashion, which apparently means writing comments on pages taped to a wall. (The type is readable if you click on the pix to enlarge them.)
“Vauge” indeed.
Signs were being made constantly.
I asked the guy who made the “utopian experiments” sign what he had in mind. (The interview is on the audio segment.) He said he wanted to see a rebirth of 1960s-style “intentional communities,” though more entrepreneurial this time, capable of supporting themselves through green business and cyberschemes. Aside from this apostle of green entrepreneuriship, I overheard others talking about how Wall Street stifled small business—as if small business didn’t pay worse and support more right-wing politicians than big business. It was a very mixed bag ideologically. It seems like the latest iteration of American populism, which hates Wall Street and internationalization but loves small business and the local. Of course, livestreaming the proceedings on the web (see here) depends on a huge technical infrastructure, but no one thinks about that at these events.
I was skeptical of this at first, and I still am. There’s no agenda at all. It’s mostly about process—meaning consensus. There’s no organization to speak of. But maybe people will just keep trickling in and it will grow and persist and something good could come of it. Word is that some buses will be coming in from Wisconsin soon. At some point, though, I fear the NYPD will stop putting up with a semi-permanent occupation of a small park. I hope not. But if you’re listening to this, and are in a position to head to lower Manhattan, check it out. Zuccotti Park, at the corner of Broadway and Liberty St.
Give the NYPD something to watch.
Here’s the report on the event from my radio show. For the full show, click here. This is just a six-minute excerpt.
Occupy Wall Street: audio report
All photos by Doug Henwood except the corporate logo flag, by Ivan Henwood.
ADDENDUM
September 23, 2011
Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim
By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.
“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Ms. Tikka, 37, told me.
scores of arrests were made.) By Thursday, the number still sleeping in Zuccotti Park, the central base of operations, appeared to be dwindling further.
Members retained hope for an infusion of energy over the weekend, but as it approached, the issue was not that the Bastille hadn’t been stormed, but that its facade had suffered hardly a chip. It is a curious fact of life in New York that even as the disparities between rich and poor grow deeper, the kind of large-scale civil agitation that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently suggested might happen here hasn’t taken shape. The city has two million more residents than Wisconsin, but there, continuing protests of the state budget bill this year turned out approximately 100,000 people at their peak. When a similar mobilization was attempted in June to challenge the city’s budget cuts, 100 people arrived for a sleep-in near City Hall.
Last week brought a disheartening coupling of statistics further delineating the city’s economic divide: The Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, which included more than 50 New Yorkers whose combined net worth totaled $211 billion, arrived at the same moment as census data showing that the percentage of the city’s population living in poverty had risen to 20.1 percent. And yet the revolution did not appear to be brewing.
Most of those entrenched in Zuccotti Park had indeed traveled from somewhere else; they had come from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Missouri, Texas and so on with drums, horns, tambourines and, in the instance of one young man, a knee-length burlap vest, fur hat, ski goggles and tiny plastic baby dolls applied to the tips of his fingers.
One of the few New Yorkers I met, a senior at Bronx High School of Science, was stopping by in fits and spurts, against the wishes of his psychiatrist mother, who feared the possibility of tear gas and had chastised her son for giving his allowance to the cause.
That cause, though, in specific terms, was virtually impossible to decipher. The group was clamoring for nothing in particular to happen right away — not the implementation of the Buffett rule or the increased regulation of the financial industry. Some didn’t think government action was the answer because the rich, they believed, would just find new ways to subvert the system.
“I’m not for interference,” Anna Katheryn Sluka, of western Michigan, told me. “I hope this all gets people who have a lot to think: ‘I’m not going to go to Barcelona for three weeks. I’m going to sponsor a small town in need.’ ”
Some said they were fighting the legal doctrine of corporate personhood; others, not fully understanding what that meant, believed it meant corporations paid no taxes whatsoever. Others came to voice concerns about the death penalty, the drug war, the environment.
“I want to get rid of the combustion engine,” John McKibben, an activist from Vermont, declared as his primary ambition.
“I want to create spectacles,” Becky Wartell, a recent graduate of the College of the Atlantic in Maine, said.
Having discerned the intellectual vacuum, Chris Spiech, an unemployed 26-year-old from New Jersey, arrived on Thursday with the hope of indoctrinating his peers in the lessons of Austrian economics, Milton Friedman and Ron Paul. “I want to abolish the Federal Reserve,” he said.
The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgeably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face — finding work, repaying student loans, figuring out ways to finish college when money has run out. But what were the chances that its members were going to receive the attention they so richly deserve carrying signs like “Even if the World Were to End Tomorrow I’d Still Plant a Tree Today”?
One day, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Adam Sarzen, a decade or so older than many of the protesters, came to Zuccotti Park seemingly just to shake his head. “Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers,” he said. “Apple, one of the biggest monopolies in the world. It trades at $400 a share. Do they even know that?”
E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com
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