By Kelly Hayes , T ruthout September 15, 2021 Protesters demonstrate during an Occupy Wall Street "Shut Down the Corporations" protest on February 29, 2012, in New York City. They are disappointed others haven't done the same. Now, many experts say the movement laid the groundwork for the economic platform of the modern Democratic Party. As Occupy struggled to find its footing after being booted out of its camps, the New York flagship, in particular, wrangled with internal conflicts over financial transparency, leadership and tactics. Occupy Wall Street: Where Are They Now? The timeline here is limited to this particular protest during this approximate time-frame (i.e., September 17 to November 15, 2011). Sue VanDerzee, a 66-year-old retired newspaper editor from Durham, Conn., participated in Occupy Wall Street a few times and in a few Connecticut chapters, but she has turned her efforts to groups focusing more on local issues. Dassaro: Having our office across the street from the park, at Brown Brothers Harriman, you knew to avoid it. The movement will never stop. I remember going down and doing a mic check and telling people that we had gotten this order and trying to spread the news that way. The protesters also used a system of hand signals as part of the consensus-driven decision-making process. By its end, hundreds of thousands of people had engaged in a broad political struggle against the prevailing political order of economic inequality and the unaccountable capitalists who had driven the world into recession only a few years prior. Democracy must be rediscovered in every generation or it withers. I mean, he updates the stats, which is admirable, but hes got the same story. Occupy Wall Street begins - HISTORY Elena Cohen: It was an incredibly, incredibly traumatic experience for everyone. In this context, he says,Occupy shifted white people. They were extremely, extraordinarily hostile. But it also had the ugly side, too. Jon Reiner, a laid-off New York marketing executive whotraveled to many Occupy camps last fall, is disheartened the movement didn't engage in electoral politics. In our brainstorming sessions, we figured that we needed to do something audacious. Dassaro: Russell Simmons, I remember, was down there giving motivational speeches. So when we look at the campaigns about student debt, the Fight for $15, Occupy Homes, all of those things got a big boost from Occupy, even if they didnt start with Occupy. Occupy Wall Street - Wikipedia For a while, the old protest chant, often repeated then, seemed true: The whole world is watching. Occupiers would talk with a straight face about the number of days or weeks it would be until a revolution came, like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia earlier that year. former anti-war and anti-nuclear activists, 'Battle for the soul of Occupy': Activists fear becoming Democratic 'pet', 'Tea and Occupy' -- a discussion/debate between members of the two movements. Is the Two-Party System Doomed? But actually it just wasn't practical, in the moment, to rig multiple megaphones together. We put together a poster for the July issue of Adbusters.The poster was a ballerina an absolutely still ballerina poised in a Zen-ish kind of way on top of this dynamic bull. Goodfriend: The police, they evicted the camp. Their nuclear growth legitimized socialism, knocked down the door forThe Squad ofdemocratic socialiststo become aforce inside the U.S. House of Representatives, and led to thewatershedcongressional billsof more than $4trillion in spending on physical and human infrastructure that will make or break Joe Bidenspresidency. Reich: The Occupy movement certainly made a lot of people aware that there was a very large and disaffected anti-corporate anti-elite in America that were angry about the corruption of the entire system, the rigging of the system. Life can be different: 10 years ago, Occupy Wall Street changed the He said to get together, occupy a space, agree on a demand and then the world will change. And almost no one could point to any concrete improvement that Occupy was responsible for. Anthony Dassaro, former foreign exchange salesperson for Brown Brothers Harriman: It was just a very difficult, uncertain time. They didn't have a protocol in place because no one had tried to occupy a privately owned park before. All these people asking me to help them. Is it enough? One stage ignited the next. Onetime protesters have helped lead a revival of the solidarity economy, trying to inscribe democracy into daily economic life. Some hold positions of relative power; others are still living on the street. The judge crossed out all kinds of things because I probably made a bunch of mistakes in the middle of the night. The business community in America and around the world doesn't understand or appreciate that dialogue we're living through. Oliver: Yes, that sounds vaguely familiar. 3. Gideon Oliver, civil-rights lawyer and former leader of the National Lawyers Guild: There were efforts along the way to try to find spaces for people to occupy together, where they could do so, hopefully, without getting evicted by the cops. For me, it's more than that. The collectives most well-known project was the Rolling Jubilee, a project in which they purchased $15m of medical debt and erased it. Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, "Wall Street Protest Begins, With Demonstrators Blocked", "Occupy Wall Street activists mark 2nd anniversary", "#OccupyWallStreet A Shift in Revolutionary Tactics", "August 2nd General Assembly on Wall Street", "The Financial Renegade - Why CNBC's former hotshot host, Dylan Ratigan, rebelled and became a harbinger of the Occupy Wall Street movement", "Anonymous Joins #OccupyWallStreet 'Wall Street, Expect Us!' As an idea, definitely. When we had nothing, people were much nicer to each other. But we didn't see that. Occupy Wall Street's Impact Continues to Grow. [51] A judge has issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the protestors, requiring Mayor Bloomberg to show cause for eviction. Goodbye, and Good Riddance, to Centrism. November 20, 2011. The Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York, September 2011. . Unlike other Occupy demonstrators who plan to join the sit-down protest on Monday, those with OccuEvolve will be in the subways, hoping to attract newcomers. To demand or not to demand? Tags: Occupy . Then there would be a march, depending on how early people woke up, for the opening bell at the stock exchange. For the past decade, Ihave traveled the country reporting on these movements, and organizersparticularly younger onestell me Occupy shaped their outlook. There is no simple formula for what makes social movements effective, for how to back up their numbers and networks with the power to make lasting change. Hilary Goodfriend, graduate student: I got to see Naomi Klein. Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn described the moment in an oral history of the movement published earlier this year in Vanity Fair. And I think that was the one big failure of Occupy Wall Street, despite the fact that we politicized a whole generation of people. YES! And I can tell you that for a few seconds, I feared for my life. Protesters with Occupy Wall Street march along New York's 5th Avenue, where prominent heads of major business and financial institutions live, on Tuesday. How Occupy Wall Street Changed Us, 10 Years Later | Time Sign up for the daily Marketplace newsletter to make sense of the most important business and economic news. But Occupy wasnt your mothers direct action. Marketplace is a division of MPR's 501 (c)(3). It's all wired. In response to that, some people were saying we should utilize this movement and maybe create a political party, like the Tea Party at the time, or come up with specific demands. The radicalization of ageneration, the ability to easily explain class, the potential for mass nonviolent direct action, and crowbarring politics to let in socialist ideas and elected officials are all invaluable legacies. That was the rhetoric and the narrative in the media as well. And you can't be . Occupiers challenged each other to check your privilege, to become ever more vigilant to how inequalities of power and wealth distort the practice of equality. 10 Years After Occupy Wall Street, Its Legacy Remains Strong The extra wealth accumulated at the top 1%. By Accra Shepp Five years ago, I spent a year photographing 400 people at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Lower Manhattan. It was like the second big wave after 1968 that somehow hit the fan. Ydanis Rodriguez, city-council member arrested during the sweep who later won a settlement from the city for $30,000: I was not planning to be arrested because I had to be at a school orientation for my daughter, who was applying for a pre-K program. Thats a really great story. The country was still reeling from the financial crisis. 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. And it gave them a strong Progressive Caucus within the House of Representatives. One officer pepper sprayed several protesters, which can be seen in a video that quickly went viral. We don't want to be co-opted by the Democratic Party or any of these figureheads.". And suddenly, theres an audience ready to listen to it, a larger audience ready to listen to it. Occupy didnt disappear. Holmes: It came from the streets of the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. There was the drumming circle, and people would come and tell jokes. But when police destroyed the occupations, they buried the most radical features of what the anthropologist-organizer David Graeber called the democracy project.. Today, when were doing this interview, you know, 10 years after Occupy, I cant tell you the answer to that. There was always plenty of coffee to keep us awake. Eventually, the general assembly that was supposed to determine how this protest goes becomes a general assembly attached to a pot of money. Wylie Stecklow: Easily could've been me. The Englers, authors of the 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, argued that movements can also be measured by their ability to shape public opinion and articulate new solutions, many of which need more longstanding organizations to carry them through. Now it feels like the world is fragmenting into some sort of dark age. His rhetoric deepened the divisions among the 99 percent and eroded democratic norms once easy to take for granted. That just wasn't tenable. Certainly, for me, it was a horrible experience. In the United States, well, we eventually got President Trump, the inconvenienced owner of the building at 40 Wall Street. Kalle Lasn, one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, said the movement was "an incredible success" by many metrics. So much of the mess of the world right now happened because, for some, the noise of democracy was unbearable. It was more the number of people and the density. Rodriguez: Even though I always recognize a lot of men and women in the NYPD for what they do to keep our streets safe, I also know there's a few bad apples as we have in all sectors in government, as we have in academia, as we have in the private sector. It had their wallet. Some were concerned with health care, some were concerned with student debt. The movements of 2011 put a lot of trust in social media and viral messaging, whose strength couldnt outlast the raw, old-fashioned kinds of power they were up against. She reviewed the papers and made some modifications. Many experts believe the economic justice movement has had lasting influence. But as a political event itself, and they are not unique in this regard, I find it hard to score them highly in terms of impact. Occupy Wall Street: What Is The Goal? Suddenly, we sort of woke up to the fact that we were onto something really big. However, the chronology does encompass subsequent events if they are specific to both OWS and Zuccotti Park. It reinforced their passion. The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time Timeline of Occupy Wall Street - Wikipedia I saw the stagnancy in the movement, said Sumumba Sobukwe, 44, who started the group in February. Tewary: I think it had an immense impact. Wall Street still holds sway in Washington, banks are minting record profits, and corporations pay starkly lower taxes than they did then. ", "Occupy Wall Street: The Protesters Speak The Anti-Capitalist Protesters Who Have Set Up Camp in Lower Manhattan Are Becoming a Fixture of the Area", "Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim", "Occupy Wall Street Movement Reports 80 Arrested Today in Protests", "Police Arrest 80 During 'Occupy Wall Street' Protest", "Anonymous Threatens NYPD After Alleged Police Brutality During #OccupyWallStreet Protests (Video)", "Anonymous Outs NYPD Officer Who Pepper-Sprayed OWS Protesters", "Noam Chomsky on the Wall Street Protests", "Michael Moore Gives Speech at Liberty Plaza for 'Occupy Wall Street', "Union Airline Pilots Occupy Wall Street", "Occupy Wall Street Media delay | Davids Camera Craft", "Protesters Stay in Liberty Square To Demonstrate Against Corporate Greed", "Dr. Cornel West Joins Occupy Wall Street, Will Lead Meeting Tonight", "A Massive Union Just Voted To Side With The Wall Street Protesters", "NYC Transit Union Joins Occupy Wall Street", "Occupy Wall Street Transport Workers Union Votes Unanimously To Support Occupy Wall Street", "Zuccotti Park Can't Be Closed to Wall Street Protesters, NYPD Says", "More Than 50 Arrested in Wall Street Protest", "Police Arrest More Than 400 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge", "Occupy Wall Street protest: NYPD accused of heavy-handed tactics", "700 Arrested After Wall Street Protest on N.Y.'s Brooklyn Bridge", "Hundreds freed after New York Wall Street protest", "Occupy Wall Street Protests: Police Make Arrests, Use Pepper Spray as Some Activists Storm Barricade", "Bloomberg Says Protesters Can Stay On, if They Obey Laws", "Occupy Wall Street: Protesters Fear Eviction Thursday 13 October 2011 Occupy Wall Street Protesters Are Bracing Themselves for Eviction as Police Insist They Will Not Be Allowed To Keep Sleeping Equipment in Zuccotti Park After It Is Cleaned", "Occupy Wall Street Park Cleaning Postponed", "Occupy Wall Street Marchers Take Times Square", "White House Draws Closer To Occupy Wall Street, Says Obama Is Fighting for the Interests of the 99%", "Occupy Wall Street protesters support injured war vet", "Police Begin Clearing Zuccotti Park of Protester", "STATEMENT OF MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG ON CLEARING AND RE-OPENING OF ZUCCOTTI PARK", "Occupy Wall Street 'Media Blackout': Journalists Arrested, Roughed Up, Blocked From Covering Clearing", "Occupy Wall Street: police evict protesters - live updates", "Order to Show Cause and Temporary Restraining Order", "ALA alarmed at seizure of Occupy Wall Street library, loss of irreplaceable material", "Occupy Wall Street Library Reportedly Thrown Away By NYPD", Occupy Wall Street settles lawsuit with city over books destruction for $232K, "Clashes and More Than 240 Arrests on Protest's 'Day of Action', "Retired police captain arrested at Occupy Wall Street", O'Brien: How one student's pepper spray photo became an Internet meme, "58 arrested in Occupy Wall Street demonstration", "Hackers post cops' personal data to avenge Occupy movement", "68 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested", "Occupy Wall Street protesters rally then busted in Grand Central", "Capitalism in crisis: The code that forms a bar to harmony", "Current woes call for smart invention not destruction", "They're back! We had this idea: Why don't we go to the very heart of global capitalism in Wall Street? Occupy protesters with "We are the 99%" signs in Bennington, Vermont. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. [51], In New York, the 2,644 Occupy-related arrests in 2011 resulted in 409 guilty pleas or convictions []. But it wasn't about people being raucous or anything like that. But I am not interested in fixating on what the young and impatient Occupiers should have done instead. Sandy Nurse's Journey from Occupy Wall Street to NYC City Council. As Wall Street looks toward the back half of 2023 and beyond, it's stuck in a sort of purgatory. Minimum wage gets a mini increase in some states, In Beijing, Yellen aims to get U.S.-China relations back on an even keel, As extreme heat lingers, millions of U.S. households face a utility shutoff crisis. But from my perspective, it was an incredible success. The Democratic Socialists of America went supernova after Occupy and Sanders (and Trumps election). A few hours later, a judge signed a temporary order halting the raid, but she was replaced by a judge who ruled against the protesters, and the occupation was effectively over. Protester on September 28, 2011. A lot of the restaurants were donating food to the occupiers. Economic conditions are roughly as bad as they were a year ago and for many, many people theyre precarious, said Bill Dobbs, of the Occupy Wall Street public relations team. That's really what the space was for, ultimately: for people to air all of these grievances and to be heard and to feel supported. ", I still identify myself with the movement, he added, but I dont feel like I have necessarily an outlet for my activism.. Occupy taught ageneration of activists how persistent protest could pressure politicians, corporations, and cops in away that sign-carrying, speech-droning weekend marches never could. Wars that began in 2011 are still raging in Syria and Yemen, and elected authoritarians are still consolidating power. Cohen: There were issues I would go down there to speak with people about. "Back during Occupy Wall Street, things were bad. Socialist Bernie Sanders rocketed from the outer orbit of politics to the solar center fueled by Occupy. Before long in Egypt and perhaps now Tunisia the democratic revolution turned into a new dictatorship. Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. Cohen: The police disregarded the order. James Risen Trump's "Final Battle" Jon Schwarz But if Occupy Wall Street was only about the few thousand people who actively occupied Zuccotti Park, we wouldn't still be talking about it. Tewary: Naomi Klein, she was coming down there a lot. It was incredible. Occupy Wall Street would have had better purpose if we actually saw more of the people who were responsible for the financial mess be in jail. They have helped organize a surge of economic populism, as well as calls for climate justice, defunding police, and canceling student debt. It saw awave of leftist movements, from Bernie Sanders and the Fight for $15to the Democratic Socialists of America and Black Lives Matter, spawned or shaped by Occupy. I like Bob Dylan, and I always quote Bob Dylan in my court appearances. That was probably the most disappointing . Occupy Wall Street: The Future And History, So Far Cohen: In activism on the left, there are aspirational tendencies of inclusivity that can often become a bit of a I'm looking for a more polite word than "pissing contest." But the police struck backwith even more brutality. which means the potential for the movement to still exist is there.. A Decade Later: Why Occupy Wall Street Failed and Where It Succeeded Can you spare some food?" Leaderless movements fossilize quickly, repeating the same tactic, as with summit-hopping during the Seattle era, occupying during the Occupy era, or cities wherenightly protestswent on for months last year. "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators occupy Zuccotti Park in New York, 2011. If Occupy Wall Street had any impact on the yawning gap between the 1% and the 99%, it isn't easy to discern. But the main show, as it were, was the conversations happening in the square.
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