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Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park on Oct. 2 Q. Sakamaki/Redux
At first glance, it is difficult to take the Occupy Wall Street protests seriously—in part because the participants seem to be having so much fun. On Oct. 2, the start of a third week of demonstrations against the financial industry, visitors to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan might have thought they had stumbled on a carnival, or an East Coast spinoff of Burning Man. A shirtless protester writhed to the beat of an African drum while another waved a flag with the slogan “Generation Revolution.” A punk rocker with a dog collar around his neck and a safety pin through his nostrils spoke about the virtues of peace, love, and anarchy.
The frivolity was deceiving. The Occupy Wall Street protests have proven more organized, disciplined, durable, and yes, businesslike, than critics—and even many supporters—might prefer to believe. There is, for a start, plenty of free food; nobody is condemning the financial sector’s excesses on an empty stomach. Organizers send out a barrage of tweets, updates, and press releases on laptops powered by portable gas-powered generators. The protesters have published their own slickly designed broadsheet, the Occupied Wall Street Journal, and handed it out to the throngs of reporters, cops, students, nurses, teachers, truckers, union leaders, military personnel, and myriad curiosity seekers who have converged on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. The paper’s lead story began with a virtual declaration of victory: “What is occurring on Wall Street right now is remarkable. For over two weeks, in the great cathedral of capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.”
Hyperbole aside, what the Occupy Wall Street activists—or “Occupiers,” as they call themselves—have achieved is remarkable. The movement reached a crescendo on Oct. 5, when thousands marched from Foley Square to the Financial District—”where their pensions have disappeared to,” in the words of the organizers. Similar protests have taken place in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, where 25 people were arrested on Sept. 30 for refusing to vacate the lobby of a Bank of America building. More rallies are being planned in at least 240 other cities, according to the website occupytogether.org. The Wall Street demos attracted the usual celebrity suspects—Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West—as well as Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who conducted a teach-in on Oct. 2 for 500 dissidents. He was joined by Jeff Madrick, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. “It’s very clear that the occupation reflects a deep and broad anger in America,” says Madrick. The listeners in Zuccotti Park were “extremely courteous, extremely attentive, and extremely curious. Some people were more radical than others, but I wasn’t booed for not being radical enough.”
Never mind that the occupiers have yet to occupy an actual building on Wall Street, or articulate concrete goals. At a time of high unemployment and rising levels of income inequality, the demonstrators’ depiction of Wall Street as the chief perpetrator of the country’s economic woes has found an audience. If it’s too early to tell whether Occupy Wall Street will coalesce into a broader movement with staying power, it’s already clear that, like the Tea Party before them, the Occupiers have tapped a reservoir of rage at the American financial Establishment and the politicians perceived to be doing its bidding. To the titans of Wall Street, the protesters may be sources of annoyance, frustration, and outright contempt. But history shows it would be a mistake to ignore them.
