From Cairo to Wall Street

Voices from the Global Spring

Anya Schiffrin, Eamon Kircher-Allen, Anya Schiffrin, Eamon Kircher-Allen

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781595588371
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XXI

"The first essential text of a new and remarkably dynamic era of social activism that has already brought profound change to the world." —Bob Herbert Something was in the air in 2011, as protest movements swept through the world—from the Arab Spring, to Spain's Indignados, to the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread from Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan across the United States in the wake of the global financial collapse. This volume collects firsthand accounts and essays about this extraordinary period—providing not only an overview of recent historical events and personal insights about what motivates people to take a stand, but also food for thought on how these events marked a turning point that shaped our current world.

OCCUPY WALL STREET

OVERVIEW

The real surprise about the Occupy Wall Street movement is probably that it didn’t happen earlier. In the 2000s, the United States had been through a gauntlet of economic and political disappointments that rivaled almost any in its history. First, in the wake of the tragedy of September 11, President George W. Bush launched two wars—one of questionable utility in Afghanistan, to root out the Taliban, and the other in Iraq, now regarded as a colossal mistake by a huge number of Americans. The conflicts left thousands of Americans (and far more Afghans and Iraqis) dead, but the second shock was the price tag. Wars originally pitched to the public as having a price tag of a few billion dollars by end of decade were on pace to cost the country $4 trillion or more. Rather than being paid for with taxes, like most wars, the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were put on the nation’s credit card. And in the midst of it all, Bush insisted on huge tax cuts that heavily benefited the wealthiest Americans.

If not many people seemed to care, it was probably because the wars were not the only thing the country was putting on the charge card. Cheap credit masked fundamental economic problems. Banks marketed subprime mortgages to buyers who could barely afford a down payment. Skyrocketing real estate prices meant middle-class Americans could borrow against their houses to finance splurges and expensive necessities alike. And why not? House prices, it seemed, could only go up. But the truth was that Americans were not getting much richer at all. The median income of American households stagnated through the decade, never regaining the peak it climbed to before the dot-com bust. Savings rates were at all-time lows.

A storm was brewing on the horizon, but few people understood that it was going to be a Category 5 financial hurricane. The overheated housing market was only part of the problem. Wall Street banks had used new credit instruments—credit default swaps, derivatives, and other over-the-counter transactions barely understood by the mathematicians who invented them—to leverage the risks they took to astronomical heights, which equaled astronomical profits. Through it all, Wall Street benefited from one of the most lax financial regulatory environments in recent history. It was getting hard to tell the regulators and the government officials from the bankers.

The big banks claimed that, with all that leveraging, they were actually spreading the risk nice and thin. When the housing bubble collapsed at the end of 2007, it turned out they were indeed spreading the risk—nice and thick, into every corner of America and the world. It was a bust on steroids. Some of the more overextended outfits—Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers—collapsed, but the fact was that most of the banks were “too big to fail.” Led by the Treasury Department, Congress initiated a $700 billion bailout. In the panic of the crash, those who complained that it was a no-strings-attached cash transfer to the very entities that had caused the crisis were brushed aside. The U.S. government was willing to do anything to stabilize the collapsing markets.

As the grim pieces fell around them, Americans struggled to make sense of their new economic reality. The economy was in deep recession. Retirement funds were lost, as were homes, with alarming frequency. The unemployment rate lurched upwards, heading to 10.6 percent before stabilizing around 9 percent, a “new normal” that was a serious drag on the economy. Americans’ tax money had been used to save the unscrupulous banks and bankers—who were still raking in bonuses by the billions—but they were still stuck with their old debts. Inequality reached historic levels. Meanwhile, the country needed help from the government more than ever, but public finances were in disarray. Tax receipts were down anyway, and since deficits had been used to finance the expensive wars, accounts were far more overdrawn than they should have been. Worst of all, the politicians who were supposed to be leading the country out of the woods were either ineffective, beholden to special interests, or in thrall to fantasies about economic policy that the crisis should have long destroyed.

Finally, there was rage. At first inchoate, it gradually coalesced into a particular perspective: the American people had been screwed by their government, their regulators, and most of all Wall Street. It might have ended there, but then something magnificent happened. Halfway around the world, activists with seemingly much more insurmountable problems had shown that mass action could create change. With Tahrir and Tunis as inspirations, Americans who might have sunk into apathy rallied together: they were off to occupy Wall Street and confront the powerful and unscrupulous financial elites on their own turf.

Beginning on September 17, 2011, protesters started filling Zuccotti Park in the heart of New York’s financial district. What was at first a trickle of people with uncertain aims mushroomed into a movement of tens and then hundreds of thousands. In New York and many other cities—Los Angeles, Oakland, and Philadelphia, to name a few—they marched under the banner “We are the 99 percent.”

FROM WISCONSIN TO WALL STREET: A CHEESEHEAD DOES NOT STAND ALONE

Harry Waisbren

Harry Waisbren is a co-founder of the Job Party and a social media analyst. He is an ardent supporter of both the Wisconsin uprising and Occupy Wall Street, as well as a proud Wisconsinite and New York City transplant.

I’m proud of my Wisconsin heritage including the silly hats called “cheeseheads.” This foam rubber headgear shaped like a wedge of cheddar cheese is worn by fans of Wisconsin’s beloved Green Bay Packers football team. Cheeseheads are pretty absurd looking, but because they are so recognizable they are now a symbol of progressive Wisconsin values and a prop for protesters who want to show their solidarity with like-minded individuals.

It was April 26th, 2011, and I could hardly believe I was breathing the same air as some of the most influential activists in the Arab Spring. Just that afternoon I’d received an e-mail announcing that two of the founding members of the Egyptian revolution’s April 6 Youth Movement—Ahmed Maher and Waleed Rashed—were in town on a press tour. What they really wanted, though, was to meet with young American bloggers and activists. So there I was with about thirty other New York City activists, ready to discuss revolutionary tactics in the digital age. Yet I was in awe and unable to speak, overwhelmed with gratitude for how these brave Egyptians had inspired my home state of Wisconsin to fight back in a manner I would have previously thought impossible. The meeting felt historically momentous, and indeed it was. A season later, many of these same New York activists would leverage such inspiration once again through Occupy Wall Street.

I first moved to New York City in August 2010 in search of opportunity, despite its being the only place this Midwestern boy thought would be too much to handle on a permanent basis. Little did I know what this move to the big city would hold for me, not to mention the connections this movement would create between Wisconsin and my newly adopted home of New York. Recognizing and facilitating the reciprocal inspiration between these two places has already become the pride of my life and a mission I am ardently committed to upholding.

Reciprocal inspiration is a concept I came up with after studying Wael Ghonim’s work during the Egyptian revolution. Ghonim is the Google marketing executive who anonymously administered the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page that acted as a central hub for online organizing. A key aspect of his social media strategy is to use it to inspire readers to break past the “psychological barrier” that prevents them from taking action in the streets. But I realized it doesn’t stop there because those taking part in these barrier-breaking actions could further inspire others, even those who took action in the first place. Social media makes this possible in a way that is unprecedented, and that is game changing.

This is why I felt a duty to defend Occupy Wall Street on that crucial October 14 morning, along with so many others. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had made his move to shut the nascent effort down despite (or because of) the burgeoning mobilization it had spawned. But more than two thousand of us were standing side by side before the dawn when the eviction was to come, waiting for the wrath of Wall Street to descend through their police proxies. All I could think about were those faced with the same decision during the Wisconsin occupation in Madison earlier in the year. The occupiers in Madison set a powerful example by persevering under similar straits. They were willing and able to hold the state capitol and maintain the movement, even in the face of Governor Scott Walker discussing inserting agent provocateurs and threatening to sic the National Guard on them. Their courage was why I knew I had to stand strong for Occupy Wall Street, despite my fears that all hell would break loose. Come what may, it was worth it, if only so we could further inspire others, like those who inspired us.

We held our positions, and deafening cheers erupted when word came that Mayor Bloomberg backed down and we had won. People were so excited that the message couldn’t even make it through the reflecting chorus of the “people’s mic,” as the human echo chamber that we used as our main means of communication came to be known. The people’s mic then announced that “One of the most beautiful aspects of this movement is the solidarity,” a fact that was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the next day when solidarity rallies were organized across the planet for #Occupy (the # is a reference to the Twitter hashtag to delineate the effort’s social media parlance). The ABC news ticker right above us at the Times Square rally was actively reporting on how “Occupy Wall Street Goes Worldwide.” We roared each time it ran across the screen.

This rapid response, this explosion of worldwide goodwill and support, was only possible through an adrenaline-powered leap over so many psychological barriers. Social media makes this happen in a completely new way, allowing inspiring actions across the globe to almost instantaneously boomerang back around and persuade others to act. The vast spread of Occupy Wall Street solidarity efforts throughout the fall of 2011 is one instance of this, as well as the similar support from across the country for the Wisconsin occupation that past spring.

The Wisconsin uprising began on February 11, after the governor declared war on government workers by attempting to unilaterally remove the right for public unions to collectively bargain. But he did not understand the depth of Wisconsin’s progressive heritage, which combined with inspiration from the ongoing Egyptian revolution, would spark a fight back that would ignite the hopes of the country. Things first came to a head on February 14, when protests began outside the capitol building in Madison, and then they escalated the next day when protesters began occupying the interior. I was following these events as closely as I could, and, just like the Egyptians, found that Twitter was the perfect place to get on-the-ground reports in real time. I had spent years as a student activist dreaming of this kind of mobilization, and Twitter’s ability to centralize these reports through a hashtag, #WIunion, allowed me to keep a grasp on it despite not being there to revel in the moment.

A few weeks prior I had become a co-founder of a new political organization called the Job Party, and we decided to launch officially in tandem with the burgeoning Wisconsin uprising. We committed to do all we could to galvanize solidarity for the effort in general as it fit directly with our mission to be the progressive counter to the Tea Party. The Job Party is not a political party per se. Rather, our focus is like the Tea Party’s in terms of using media-savvy grassroots action to change the political narrative—away from the distraction of how we are “taxed enough already” (the T-E-A in Tea Party), and onto the real problem of how we need jobs.

Wisconsin was under attack from its Tea Party governor, and collectively the state was crying out, “Enough!” Even though my commitments in New York prevented me from physically being in Wisconsin, the Job Party became the perfect platform for me to help defend my home state against this official declaration of class war on working families made by Walker and the Tea Party.

Back in New York we acted quickly, and by February 18, we held one of the first Wisconsin solidarity rallies that would soon sweep the nation. What followed was the realization of just how powerful the reciprocal inspiration boomerang could be, as we witnessed our “Cheesehead Rallies” grow exponentially in size and energy. We wore cheeseheads newly shipped from Wisconsin to symbolize our solidarity, relishing the opportunity to follow their example.

A catalyzing point was already reached by our second rally on the 22nd, in which participants broke past their psychological barriers en masse. I watched as cynicism and learned helplessness evaporated in light of the powerful precedent being set. Wisconsinites were fighting back no holds barred, and the occupation in Madison had made my home state a light for all of us in New York and beyond to follow out of the abyss.

The escalation of our rallies inspired MoveOn.org in particular to call for Wisconsin events at the capitols of all fifty states. The organization used it as an opportunity to launch the metabrand American Dream movement rhetoric prescribed by progressive organizer Van Jones, and it committed from the outset to the example Wisconsin occupiers were setting. We worked hand in hand with MoveOn to organize a focal point City Hall rally for the nationwide Day of Action on the 26th. This national outpouring of support upped the ante in Wisconsin, where t...