There they were, thousands of young and older people crowding into Wall Street on 9/17/2011 as I took the luxury of celebrating my 73rd birthday. But what a gift to see these protestors streaming online, holding the bull by the horns (if not the cojones), calling the Street for what is, a collection of murderous gangsters who’d sell their mothers for a dime. Still the cops crept in on cats’ feet surrounding them then barricading Wall Street and pushing the young people over to Zuccotti Park. Here are some great pictures and posters from it. Was it for real? Will it last? Is it sponsored by dark forces? Who knows? For now, let’s go with the flow.
The move to the park was okay. It’s right across from City Hall, couple of blocks away from Wall Street. They’d work their way back. Roseanne was there, as reported on Democracy Now, saying, “These are the people who decimated our economy and caused all the problems in the world, there on Wall Street.”
A 72-year old woman (I should be ashamed I wasn’t there), Mary Ellen Marino said, “I came because I’m upset with the fact that bailout of Wall Street didn’t help any of the people holding mortgages. All of the money went to Wall Street, and none of it went to Main Street. No, we’ve just learned that Geithner was actually asked to split up the Citibank, and he didn’t do it. And Obama didn’t do anything about it.”
She added “My particular interest is not this big picture, but it’s the little picture. I have two daughters. Both of them have Citibank mortgages. And during this two-year period, when they were supposed to be helping people that were in danger of foreclosure, they did not refinance these mortgages, of either of my children, and of one of the children had a house that was then worth half of its original value. She had put down a $45,000 down payment to buy this condominium, and it was worth half of what she paid for it. And so, when she lost her job for the second time during this crisis, she had to abandon the house. She’s now without a house, without a job. My other daughter and her husband are struggling very much to maintain their mortgage. And I’ve had to go back to work. I’m going to be 72 in October, and I’ve had to go back to work full-time in order to help my children.”
Wow and where was I? I stole a day to drive to the woods and take a long walk to get away from the big city’s ills. It was sunny, everything still green, the air fragrant with cut grass, a good day to still be alive. Still, all those people back there were toughing it out and wouldn’t go away soon. I guess I’d had enough of writing, fighting, battling it out the week before on 9/11 at the WTC, and bucking the cops, the maze of steel barricades, and the force of the tourist crowds. Sorry, Wall Street protestors. I owe you for your courage, your ethics, your sense of decency, from which we will all profit because you all put their butts on the line.
This could be our Tahrir Square in Cairo or Madrid’s Puerto del Sol Square. After all, hundreds had slept outside near Wall Street for the past two nights, some on newspapers, cardboard, in sleeping bags.
Democracy Now Editor Sam Alcoff, and Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence gave a live update from the streets. They spoke with David Graeber, an anthropologist who teaches at Goldsmith’s at the University of London, the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and participated in the activities.
Graeber said, “Ad Busters, the magazine based in Toronto . . . They had this conception, and they thought they could bring it into being. Bunch of us showed up, you know, relatively unprepared for what to expect. On August 2nd, when they decided to call a general meeting, and after a little bit of uncertainty, we sort of started putting together a process. We decided to model it on the idea of the sort of horizontal direct democracy they had in Europe. And in way, the Wall Street action was one focus, but the very idea of building a kind of general assembly movement was a lot of what we’re really about.”
Asked by Amy Goodman what he meant by “general assembly” and how the process started, he answered, “Well, what people are doing in Europe is essentially trying to reinvent democracy. The idea is that, you know, all of the political parties have basically bankrupted themselves. They’re all essentially bought and sold by the financial elite that created this crisis. There’s no possibility of their actually coming up with a solution. And sometimes you have to start over. People have, like, to go into their public brainstorming idea. I mean, essentially the idea is the system is not going to save us: we’re going to have to save ourselves. So, we’re going to try and get as many people as possible to camp in some public place and start rebuilding society as we’d like to see it.”
About 2,000 originally showed up on Wall Street.
Graeber pointed out that these people were like the people who showed up in Egypt and Spain, those who had gone through the system of education and were deep in debt and found it impossible to get jobs. “The system failed them . . . ,” he said, “If there is going to be any kind of society worth living, we’re going to have to create it ourselves.”
It turns out that Mayor Michael Bloomberg, during a radio interview, compared the demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street to those taking part in the Arab Spring.
This was going on as President Obama was ready to preview his deficit-reduction plans, including tax increases as well as cuts in entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and probably Social Security—meant to reduce spending by more than $3 trillion over the next decade. His Jobs Bill also asks for $1.1 trillion in savings from winding down US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Added to that, is the Buffet Rule increase he is proposing. That is, to have millionaires, starting from $1 million on up, to billionaires pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as Buffet’s secretary pays, i.e. working people, the middle class. Tough as it will be, it’s worth the try.
The billionaire-investor wrote about it in an op-ed in the New York Times last month, called “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” Of course, Repuglican Mitch McConnell said, “If Warren Buffett would like to give up some of his benefits, we’d be happy to talk about it. I mean, I think that means-adjusting benefits [scrutinizing your income and assets to cut your benefits] is one of the ways that we’re going to have to solve at least the Social Security and Medicare problems, long term, for the next generations. With regard to his tax rate, if he’s feeling guilty about it, I think he should send in a check. But we don’t want to stagnate this economy by raising taxes.” No, you just want to starve the bottom half and fatten the top half some more. Bottom line, over the weekend, New York’s financial district was flooded with protestors.
Graeber also remarked that Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, was critical on Fox News of taxing the wealthy. Ryan said, “If you tax job traders more, you get less job creation. If you tax investment more, you get less investment.” That’s not true because the government can create jobs internally or for people to work on strengthening our infrastructure. Ryan added, “At a time when experts are telling us, including like I said, the fiscal commission, we should lower tax rates on investment and job creation by getting rid of all the loopholes, so we can create economic growth.” This sounds like another variation on the Reaganomics “trickle down” theme. He went on, “So we think this is going in the wrong direction. Let’s forget that under current law that the president has already passed, the top rate on individuals and small businesses in 2013 goes to about 44.8 percent
“So, we have employers here in Wisconsin that pay that tax rate, who are competing against countries that are taxing their businesses from like 16 percent in Canada (that’s the old North American Union, buddy, your pal Bush’s creation), to almost 21 percent going in England, 25 percent in China.” The world taxes their businesses at about 25 percent (but they’re not fighting five wars, pal) and he’s saying we’re going to tax these job creators at about 45 percent with this new tax What it does is it adds further instability to our system . . . and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs (well, let them sit on their money and do nothing.) And you lose the class war.
Graeber commented, “Generally speaking, when you hear a Republican talk about class warfare, you know they’re waging it (bravo). I think that the easiest way to put what’s going on in perspective is to think of the situation in the ’50s under Eisenhower, who was of course a Republican president, when tax rates on the wealthiest were actually 90 percent. I don’t remember the economy freezing up and falling apart in the 1950s. In fact, it was booming. In the ’60’s the same thing. We’re not talking about some radical proposal. We’re talking about inching back, you know, a tenth of the way back to where we were when America was at its wealthiest. So I think the rhetoric is just completely false.” Ah so.
I personally can’t honestly say that Occupy Wall Street was beginning to look like the Arab Spring or even the 9/11 commemoration. The latter really was more like the decade-long ritual of thousands of tourists coming just to gawk at where the disaster was, buying souvenirs and shuffling in a stupor through the streets.
This time, the protestors were not silenced and they shouted, “Occupy Wall Street,” over and over again, led by Ad Busters, a Vancouver-based culture-jamming magazine, which had put out a call for Saturday’s protest on Wall Street in July. The goals range from limiting corporate contributions to political campaigns, auditing (if not eliminating) the Federal Reserve, challenging all of global capitalism. Here, here!
Nathan Schneider said the protestors though, not articulating their demands in a concrete way, were carrying signs saying “Wall Street is our Street,” “Hungry, eat a banker,” “Smash capitalism.” It represented a broad range of demands and slogans for the broad range of offenses the Street’s been responsible for. Basically, they were fed up with it and what it represented in the US and they want a change—for the better, not the worse.
Returning to Graeber, who carried the day, he said, “President Obama really bought into the dominant ideology, which is essentially Republican. Finally he was to wage an election campaign, so he has to make some gestures in the other direction, because he know the overwhelming majority of the American public are in favor of taxing the rich. And he also knows that it’s almost certainly going to be shot down. There’s nothing that the Republicans are less likely to put up with than a proposal like this [Jobs Act].”
When Amy Goodman asked him about debt cancellation, Graeber answered, “Well, one of the things that I discovered in researching my book is that the kind of debt crisis we’re experiencing now, being a real debt crisis, which is a debt crisis that affects ordinary people, debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. They’re not anything set in stone. It’s, generally speaking, when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable. In the past, though, there have been mechanisms, when things get to a point of real social crisis that have always existed. And they vary by the period of history. In the ancient Middle East, often new kings would simply declare a clean slate and cancel all debts, or all consumer debts, commercial debts between merchants were often left alone. The Jubilee was a way of institutionalizing that. In the Middle Age, there were bans on interest taking entirely. There have been many mechanisms.
“But whenever you have what I call a period of virtual credit money, when money is recognized not to be a thing like gold and silver, but a social relation or promise that people make to each other, which has become increasingly clear since the ’70s, when we went off the gold standard—and I think 2008 really brought that home—debts can be renegotiated. They’re not set in stone. Trillions of dollars of debt was made to disappear. We understand now that this is a political arrangement, and it can always be readjusted. And I think what the people coming to the squares—and Wall Street now included—are saying is that, well, if that’s true, if democracy is going to mean anything now, we’re all going to have to be able to weigh in on what sort of promises are made and what sort of promises are adjusted when you enter into a crisis.”
Goodman asked about debt cancellation in developing nations but wondered what about the United States.
Graeber answered, “Well, the interesting thing is that most of the developing nations have actually pulled themselves out of the situation. Structural adjustment has come home to Europe and America. I think it would be a great idea. I think it would bring home that we really are in a different age, that money doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to. And there are people who have tried it. Saudi Arabia, actually most dramatically, that was their reaction to the Arab Spring: they declared a debt cancellation. So there are precedents. I mean, they kind of don’t want people to know that they did it, for obvious reasons, but they did.”
Goodman asked about the crisis now in Europe.
Interestingly, Graeber commented, “The crisis now in Europe is an example of the same thing. The austerity regimes that are being imposed now on Europe and on America are remarkably similar to what happened—you know, what used to be called the Third World debt crisis. First you declare a financial debt—a financial crisis. You bring in these people who are supposedly neutral technocrats, who are in fact enforcing this extreme neoliberal ideology. You bypass all democratic accountability and impose things that no one ever possibly had agreed to. It’s the same thing. And one reason it’s happening to us now is that there was really successful mobilization around the world against those policies. In a lot of ways, the global justice movement was successful. The IMF was kicked out of East Asia. It was kicked out of Latin America. And now it’s come home to us.”
Well, let’s end on that taste of first-rate thinking that is coming from the financial district of New York and the Movement to Occupy Wall Street. As of this writing, the street action continues, but on the fifth day the cops moved in with heavy hands and bullhorns to silence protestors. See this video clip from RT.com’s 9/20/11 Alyona Show. Where it goes nobody knows. But good luck, guys. The world is watching you.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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My best birthday gift: ‘Overcoming Wall Street’
Posted on September 23, 2011 by Jerry Mazza
There they were, thousands of young and older people crowding into Wall Street on 9/17/2011 as I took the luxury of celebrating my 73rd birthday. But what a gift to see these protestors streaming online, holding the bull by the horns (if not the cojones), calling the Street for what is, a collection of murderous gangsters who’d sell their mothers for a dime. Still the cops crept in on cats’ feet surrounding them then barricading Wall Street and pushing the young people over to Zuccotti Park. Here are some great pictures and posters from it. Was it for real? Will it last? Is it sponsored by dark forces? Who knows? For now, let’s go with the flow.
The move to the park was okay. It’s right across from City Hall, couple of blocks away from Wall Street. They’d work their way back. Roseanne was there, as reported on Democracy Now, saying, “These are the people who decimated our economy and caused all the problems in the world, there on Wall Street.”
A 72-year old woman (I should be ashamed I wasn’t there), Mary Ellen Marino said, “I came because I’m upset with the fact that bailout of Wall Street didn’t help any of the people holding mortgages. All of the money went to Wall Street, and none of it went to Main Street. No, we’ve just learned that Geithner was actually asked to split up the Citibank, and he didn’t do it. And Obama didn’t do anything about it.”
She added “My particular interest is not this big picture, but it’s the little picture. I have two daughters. Both of them have Citibank mortgages. And during this two-year period, when they were supposed to be helping people that were in danger of foreclosure, they did not refinance these mortgages, of either of my children, and of one of the children had a house that was then worth half of its original value. She had put down a $45,000 down payment to buy this condominium, and it was worth half of what she paid for it. And so, when she lost her job for the second time during this crisis, she had to abandon the house. She’s now without a house, without a job. My other daughter and her husband are struggling very much to maintain their mortgage. And I’ve had to go back to work. I’m going to be 72 in October, and I’ve had to go back to work full-time in order to help my children.”
Wow and where was I? I stole a day to drive to the woods and take a long walk to get away from the big city’s ills. It was sunny, everything still green, the air fragrant with cut grass, a good day to still be alive. Still, all those people back there were toughing it out and wouldn’t go away soon. I guess I’d had enough of writing, fighting, battling it out the week before on 9/11 at the WTC, and bucking the cops, the maze of steel barricades, and the force of the tourist crowds. Sorry, Wall Street protestors. I owe you for your courage, your ethics, your sense of decency, from which we will all profit because you all put their butts on the line.
This could be our Tahrir Square in Cairo or Madrid’s Puerto del Sol Square. After all, hundreds had slept outside near Wall Street for the past two nights, some on newspapers, cardboard, in sleeping bags.
Democracy Now Editor Sam Alcoff, and Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence gave a live update from the streets. They spoke with David Graeber, an anthropologist who teaches at Goldsmith’s at the University of London, the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and participated in the activities.
Graeber said, “Ad Busters, the magazine based in Toronto . . . They had this conception, and they thought they could bring it into being. Bunch of us showed up, you know, relatively unprepared for what to expect. On August 2nd, when they decided to call a general meeting, and after a little bit of uncertainty, we sort of started putting together a process. We decided to model it on the idea of the sort of horizontal direct democracy they had in Europe. And in way, the Wall Street action was one focus, but the very idea of building a kind of general assembly movement was a lot of what we’re really about.”
Asked by Amy Goodman what he meant by “general assembly” and how the process started, he answered, “Well, what people are doing in Europe is essentially trying to reinvent democracy. The idea is that, you know, all of the political parties have basically bankrupted themselves. They’re all essentially bought and sold by the financial elite that created this crisis. There’s no possibility of their actually coming up with a solution. And sometimes you have to start over. People have, like, to go into their public brainstorming idea. I mean, essentially the idea is the system is not going to save us: we’re going to have to save ourselves. So, we’re going to try and get as many people as possible to camp in some public place and start rebuilding society as we’d like to see it.”
About 2,000 originally showed up on Wall Street.
Graeber pointed out that these people were like the people who showed up in Egypt and Spain, those who had gone through the system of education and were deep in debt and found it impossible to get jobs. “The system failed them . . . ,” he said, “If there is going to be any kind of society worth living, we’re going to have to create it ourselves.”
It turns out that Mayor Michael Bloomberg, during a radio interview, compared the demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street to those taking part in the Arab Spring.
This was going on as President Obama was ready to preview his deficit-reduction plans, including tax increases as well as cuts in entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and probably Social Security—meant to reduce spending by more than $3 trillion over the next decade. His Jobs Bill also asks for $1.1 trillion in savings from winding down US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Added to that, is the Buffet Rule increase he is proposing. That is, to have millionaires, starting from $1 million on up, to billionaires pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as Buffet’s secretary pays, i.e. working people, the middle class. Tough as it will be, it’s worth the try.
The billionaire-investor wrote about it in an op-ed in the New York Times last month, called “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” Of course, Repuglican Mitch McConnell said, “If Warren Buffett would like to give up some of his benefits, we’d be happy to talk about it. I mean, I think that means-adjusting benefits [scrutinizing your income and assets to cut your benefits] is one of the ways that we’re going to have to solve at least the Social Security and Medicare problems, long term, for the next generations. With regard to his tax rate, if he’s feeling guilty about it, I think he should send in a check. But we don’t want to stagnate this economy by raising taxes.” No, you just want to starve the bottom half and fatten the top half some more. Bottom line, over the weekend, New York’s financial district was flooded with protestors.
Graeber also remarked that Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, was critical on Fox News of taxing the wealthy. Ryan said, “If you tax job traders more, you get less job creation. If you tax investment more, you get less investment.” That’s not true because the government can create jobs internally or for people to work on strengthening our infrastructure. Ryan added, “At a time when experts are telling us, including like I said, the fiscal commission, we should lower tax rates on investment and job creation by getting rid of all the loopholes, so we can create economic growth.” This sounds like another variation on the Reaganomics “trickle down” theme. He went on, “So we think this is going in the wrong direction. Let’s forget that under current law that the president has already passed, the top rate on individuals and small businesses in 2013 goes to about 44.8 percent
“So, we have employers here in Wisconsin that pay that tax rate, who are competing against countries that are taxing their businesses from like 16 percent in Canada (that’s the old North American Union, buddy, your pal Bush’s creation), to almost 21 percent going in England, 25 percent in China.” The world taxes their businesses at about 25 percent (but they’re not fighting five wars, pal) and he’s saying we’re going to tax these job creators at about 45 percent with this new tax What it does is it adds further instability to our system . . . and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs (well, let them sit on their money and do nothing.) And you lose the class war.
Graeber commented, “Generally speaking, when you hear a Republican talk about class warfare, you know they’re waging it (bravo). I think that the easiest way to put what’s going on in perspective is to think of the situation in the ’50s under Eisenhower, who was of course a Republican president, when tax rates on the wealthiest were actually 90 percent. I don’t remember the economy freezing up and falling apart in the 1950s. In fact, it was booming. In the ’60’s the same thing. We’re not talking about some radical proposal. We’re talking about inching back, you know, a tenth of the way back to where we were when America was at its wealthiest. So I think the rhetoric is just completely false.” Ah so.
I personally can’t honestly say that Occupy Wall Street was beginning to look like the Arab Spring or even the 9/11 commemoration. The latter really was more like the decade-long ritual of thousands of tourists coming just to gawk at where the disaster was, buying souvenirs and shuffling in a stupor through the streets.
This time, the protestors were not silenced and they shouted, “Occupy Wall Street,” over and over again, led by Ad Busters, a Vancouver-based culture-jamming magazine, which had put out a call for Saturday’s protest on Wall Street in July. The goals range from limiting corporate contributions to political campaigns, auditing (if not eliminating) the Federal Reserve, challenging all of global capitalism. Here, here!
Nathan Schneider said the protestors though, not articulating their demands in a concrete way, were carrying signs saying “Wall Street is our Street,” “Hungry, eat a banker,” “Smash capitalism.” It represented a broad range of demands and slogans for the broad range of offenses the Street’s been responsible for. Basically, they were fed up with it and what it represented in the US and they want a change—for the better, not the worse.
Returning to Graeber, who carried the day, he said, “President Obama really bought into the dominant ideology, which is essentially Republican. Finally he was to wage an election campaign, so he has to make some gestures in the other direction, because he know the overwhelming majority of the American public are in favor of taxing the rich. And he also knows that it’s almost certainly going to be shot down. There’s nothing that the Republicans are less likely to put up with than a proposal like this [Jobs Act].”
When Amy Goodman asked him about debt cancellation, Graeber answered, “Well, one of the things that I discovered in researching my book is that the kind of debt crisis we’re experiencing now, being a real debt crisis, which is a debt crisis that affects ordinary people, debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. They’re not anything set in stone. It’s, generally speaking, when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable. In the past, though, there have been mechanisms, when things get to a point of real social crisis that have always existed. And they vary by the period of history. In the ancient Middle East, often new kings would simply declare a clean slate and cancel all debts, or all consumer debts, commercial debts between merchants were often left alone. The Jubilee was a way of institutionalizing that. In the Middle Age, there were bans on interest taking entirely. There have been many mechanisms.
“But whenever you have what I call a period of virtual credit money, when money is recognized not to be a thing like gold and silver, but a social relation or promise that people make to each other, which has become increasingly clear since the ’70s, when we went off the gold standard—and I think 2008 really brought that home—debts can be renegotiated. They’re not set in stone. Trillions of dollars of debt was made to disappear. We understand now that this is a political arrangement, and it can always be readjusted. And I think what the people coming to the squares—and Wall Street now included—are saying is that, well, if that’s true, if democracy is going to mean anything now, we’re all going to have to be able to weigh in on what sort of promises are made and what sort of promises are adjusted when you enter into a crisis.”
Goodman asked about debt cancellation in developing nations but wondered what about the United States.
Graeber answered, “Well, the interesting thing is that most of the developing nations have actually pulled themselves out of the situation. Structural adjustment has come home to Europe and America. I think it would be a great idea. I think it would bring home that we really are in a different age, that money doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to. And there are people who have tried it. Saudi Arabia, actually most dramatically, that was their reaction to the Arab Spring: they declared a debt cancellation. So there are precedents. I mean, they kind of don’t want people to know that they did it, for obvious reasons, but they did.”
Goodman asked about the crisis now in Europe.
Interestingly, Graeber commented, “The crisis now in Europe is an example of the same thing. The austerity regimes that are being imposed now on Europe and on America are remarkably similar to what happened—you know, what used to be called the Third World debt crisis. First you declare a financial debt—a financial crisis. You bring in these people who are supposedly neutral technocrats, who are in fact enforcing this extreme neoliberal ideology. You bypass all democratic accountability and impose things that no one ever possibly had agreed to. It’s the same thing. And one reason it’s happening to us now is that there was really successful mobilization around the world against those policies. In a lot of ways, the global justice movement was successful. The IMF was kicked out of East Asia. It was kicked out of Latin America. And now it’s come home to us.”
Well, let’s end on that taste of first-rate thinking that is coming from the financial district of New York and the Movement to Occupy Wall Street. As of this writing, the street action continues, but on the fifth day the cops moved in with heavy hands and bullhorns to silence protestors. See this video clip from RT.com’s 9/20/11 Alyona Show. Where it goes nobody knows. But good luck, guys. The world is watching you.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.