BANKS GOT BAILED OUT, WE GOT SOLD OUT
IT WAS DECEMBER 2, 2008, WHEN THE 240 PEOPLE WHO WORKED at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago got the notification that they were losing their jobs.
Months into the recession launched by the collapse of financial markets, the company, which made energy-efficient windows and doors ideal for the green retrofitting being touted by president-elect Barack Obama, was struggling. But the biggest problem, according to the workers themselves, was Bank of America. Despite a fresh infusion of taxpayer dollars being pumped into the bank’s coffers—$25 billion, supposedly to reinvigorate its stalled lending in the wake of the financial crisis—the bank was apparently unwilling to continue extending credit to Republic.
There had been some indications that things were not going well for Republic, according to Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110, the union representing the employees. But while the announcement came as a shock, the workers at Republic were not going to join the ranks of the 600,000 other manufacturing workers laid off that year without a fight. “If I don’t fight, I know I lose,” said Melvin “Ricky” Maurice Maclin, vice president of Local 1110. “If I do fight, at least I stand a chance of winning.”1
Two hundred or so of those window-and-door makers refused to leave, locking themselves into the factory in the first such occupation the United States had seen in decades. Their demands were simple: their legally required severance pay, called for under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which requires sixty days’ notice before a mass layoff. Lalo Munoz, who had worked for Republic for thirty-four years, said, “They decided just to kick us into the streets, with no benefits or nothing, not even what we have already earned.”2
The workers’ willingness to resist surprised the organizers. “We proposed this idea of occupying the factory as a peaceful nonviolent civil disobedience,” Fried told me. “What we didn’t anticipate was everybody wanting to be a part of it.” She’d expected fifty or so workers to stay in the factory, but over four times that number did. “We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere until we get what’s fair and what’s ours. They thought they would get rid of us easily, but if we have to be here for Christmas, it doesn’t matter,” said Silvia Mazon, a thirteen-year employee at Republic at her first protest.3
Their occupation tapped into a growing anger among Americans at the size of the bailout package extended to the world’s biggest banks, the very people responsible for the crisis that had tossed so many out of work, shuttered so many small businesses, and evaporated billions in housing wealth. National media, long unused to covering labor struggles, poured in, speaking to workers through an open door. Rabble-rousing documentarian Michael Moore turned up. So did the local bishop of the Evangelical Catholic Church, James Wilkowski, the son of a steelworker, who administered Communion to the workers in the occupied factory. Jesse Sharkey, a local teacher who was also engaged in a fight over public schools turned up and spoke. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) paid the workers a visit. And president-elect Barack Obama addressed the workers in a news conference, saying, “The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.”4
After six days of splashy media coverage and protests in front of Bank of America branches around the country in solidarity with the occupiers, Republic and the bank agreed to the workers’ demands. In February 2009, California company Serious Materials purchased the factory and agreed to hire back the old workforce.
After the victory, the workers took a “Republic victory tour” to inspire more people to fight back as they had. They told their listeners they didn’t have to take concessions and accept the status quo. “I’d like to think that we helped kick off the next wave, and certainly the chant that we came up with, which was ‘Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out,’ was adopted by a lot of people,” Fried said.
While the Republic workers were trying to encourage others to stand up and fight, most of the country remained in shock. But shortly after Serious Materials bought the Republic factory, a group of Connecticut residents boarded a bus headed to prosperous Fairfield, median income over $78,000. They were headed to the home of Douglas L. Poling, executive vice president for energy and infrastructure investments at American International Group (AIG), technically an insurance company, but one with an investment bank grafted on top. This unwieldy beast had insured a slew of bad mortgages via credit-default swaps, which required AIG to pay out if the mortgages went into default. When those bad mortgages failed, so did AIG, and the US government stepped in and bailed it out, to the tune of over $170 billion.5
The bailout alone would have made people angry enough. Regular people, many of them suddenly unemployed or facing foreclosure, were already wondering why the big banks merited more than $700 billion and they got nothing. Congress rebelled at the idea that it should hand over that many taxpayer dollars without any strings attached, and made Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, go back and revise the main bailout during the last days of his tenure in the job. He promised to use the money to modify mortgages for homeowners facing foreclosure. But when AIG announced that it would be distributing $165 million in bonuses to executives who oversaw the same unit that had made the colossally bad decisions that nearly broke the company, at least one group had had enough.6
“I wanted to make T-shirts that said ‘too small to fail,’” remembered Joe Dinkin of the Working Families Party (WFP), a political organization that at the time worked in Connecticut, New York, and Oregon alongside labor and community groups to put working people’s concerns on politicians’ radar. The idea played on the “Too Big to Fail” line already being passed around as justification for the bailouts, meaning that AIG, Bank of America, and other institutions were too systemically important to be allowed to go under.
The WFP decided to put together the daylong bus tour to “show who had actually been hurt by the collapse,” Dinkin said. “It wasn’t the trader who had made $3 million a year for the last five years; it was actually the people who had been foreclosed, the people who had lost their low-wage jobs, the people whose employers had gotten rid of their health-care coverage.” Having chartered the bus, WFP gathered people like Asaad Jackson, a music teacher from Hartford who was paying down medical debt; Mary Huguley, a pastor whose sister-in-law was facing foreclosure; and Mark Dziubek, a steelworker who’d lost his job at a Bristol factory. The tour, nicknamed “Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless,” was eye-opening for the participants. “It’s like comparing a rosy red apple to burnt toast, and that’s not even the best metaphor,” Jackson said of the difference between his neighborhood and that of AIG’s Douglas Poling.
The WFP tour seemed to fit a niche that the media had been looking to fill. The press response, at least at first, was massive. Dinkin remembered, “People were portraying us like we were going to be there with flaming pitchforks.”
There were no pitchforks on the day of the bus tour, March 21, 2009. In Fairfield, the participants climbed down from the bus and, backed by about fifty reporters, approached Poling’s home. The single largest bonus check, a full $6.4 million, according to reports, had gone to Poling, which the company’s government-appointed chairman justified by writing, “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses—which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers—if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.”7
Intent on inviting the wealthy executive to come visit their neighborhoods, the protesters were greeted by a private security guard instead. Jeff Meyer, a local dog-walker, stopped to join them. “Because the American taxpayer now owns 80 percent of AIG, they should have full access to anything and everything they own, including their country club memberships, their recreation facilities, their built-in swimming pools, but we’ll do it on a schedule,” he said. “America has stopped being a country that cares about its people. It’s all about greed.”8
At the time, the WFP’s goal was fairly simple and localized, though it seemed to tap into something bigger. The organization aimed to draw attention to the budget struggle in Hartford and prevent cuts from going through that would hurt people like the ones who participated in the tour. And on that level, they were modestly successful: the Republican governor of Connecticut actually approved a small tax increase on high earners to make up for the revenue lost to the recession. “In our minds the small-bore goal was not to indict the system, though we thought the obvious screwed-up nature of the system was a pretty good hook,” Dinkin said.
But the national press did not lavish attention on the Working Families tour or the Republic Windows and Doors because of severance checks of $7,000 per worker or the Connecticut budget wars. Reporters came because the crisis that was rocking the nation was unlike anything Americans had experienced before, and it was still unclear how the public was going to react to it. They came because if any moment seemed to call for people in the streets, it was this one.
Despite the WFP’s attempts to be polite during the bus tour, AIG executives reacted as though they were being hunted by howling mobs. One, speaking anonymously, compared the protests to McCarthyism; AIG’s CEO later argued that protests were “intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that—sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.” Private security companies reported a boom in the executive-protection business. Executives were going to react as though they were under assault no matter how polite the protesters were, but maybe something rowdy was exactly what the rest of the country was looking for.9
Most existing political organizations, particularly those aligned with the new president, seemed to be waiting for elected officials to take the lead, and they didn’t appear to want to get rowdy. George Goehl, executive director of National People’s Action (NPA), a coalition of community groups that at the time of the recession was concentrated mostly in the Midwest, said that one of NPA’s goals was to produce public images of unrest, but he felt that the response did not live up to the goal. “The financial crisis was incredibly painful and hurtful for most Americans and, really dramatically, for certain communities. And we did not respond as a movement in the way that we could have and should have. At some level, capitalism was against the ropes gasping for air for a second, and we were working on health-care reform.”
There was, in his view and that of longtime labor organizer Stephen Lerner, a failure by the Democratic Party and its allies—the ones now in power in Washington—to pivot away from the plan formed on the campaign trail and understand the fundamentally different moment over which they found themselves presiding. The organizations that had a history of making trouble specifically for the financial industry were in a weak position, the groups that had formed in the Bush era to protest the wars were unprepared for a massive economic meltdown, and the labor movement was focused on supporting the Obama administration’s priorities. “We kind of watched for a minute and it was like, ‘Wow. There is nobody in the streets,’” Goehl said. “‘This is nuts.’”
THE CRISIS THAT RIPPLED ACROSS THE WORLD IN 2008 LEFT THE United States mostly in shock. It rattled presidential candidates and pundits alike, fundamentally changing the political debate as the election rolled toward its close. Alexis Goldstein, working at Merrill Lynch at the time, remembered executives coming down to the trading floor, staring at a sort of market scoreboard that hung there, arms folded, watching the numbers fall. “There was definitely a sense that the market had imploded,” she said. “Everything spread to every market. There was absolutely no confidence that other banks were solvent, so it didn’t matter that ‘Oh, it is mortgage backed securities that are worthless.’ You didn’t know if the bank was going to be around tomorrow, so why would you trade with another bank?”
It still seems, as financial journalist Moe Tkacik wrote in 2010, that the story of 2008 is too big to tell, which goes some way toward explaining the fragmented nature of the immediate response. Most accounts get at part of it—at the bursting of a housing bubble filled with the hot air of speculators packaging and reselling mortgages into securities overrated by ratings agencies that were paid by the banks that hired them; at the fraud that happened at bank after bank in the rush to issue a mortgage to everyone who could afford one, and plenty of people who couldn’t; at the predatory practices that shoved black and Latino homebuyers into “subprime” mortgages with higher interest rates, even if they qualified for a more traditional “prime” mortgage. There are stories of the collapse of investment firm Lehman Brothers and stories of the rescue of Bear Stearns or Washington Mutual or Countrywide, making the too-big-to-fail banks even bigger and less likely to be allowed to fail. There are stories of the growing inequality in the country, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of the ultra-wealthy, while real wages stagnated and fell, union membership declined, and entire companies decamped for other shores; and stories of how working people compensated for those falling wages with debt, using their homes as credit cards when actual credit cards wouldn’t cut it, and how this was the last straw that made the whole broken edifice tumble down when those homes lost value, even the bad jobs disappeared, and we had no way to spend ourselves out of economic stagnation.10
What most of those stories leave out is how it felt in those moments in 2008 and 2009, when even the bankers were afraid their banks were about to be nationalized, and when the treasury secretary and Federal Reserve chairman shifted from their reassuring coos about a small recession to increasingly shrill warnings of imminent economic collapse. We were teetering on the brink of something that most people in the United States had a hard time imagining. As it happened, we remained on that brink, never quite crossing the line into a moment where the buses stopped running or the grocery-store shelves were empty. But it can be hard to remember that it felt like that moment was on its way. All we can do is rub our eyes, look around at the wreckage, and think about what has changed.
And much has changed. The biggest banks got not only the $700 billion authorized by Congress in the last days of the Bush administration, but also trillions—with a T—more from the Federal Reserve, an amount that equaled, according to financial journalists at Bloomberg, “more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.” Economist Dean Baker argued that putting the Troubled Asset Relief Program up for a vote at all was simply “a way to get Congress’s fingerprints on the policy of subsidizing the banks,” to make it look like the giant safety net of taxpayer cash strung below giant multinational finance firms was democratically created.11
The “bailout” for the nonfinancial sector—leaving aside the bailout of the auto industry, which was mostly notable for the amount of strings attached to it, unlike the money handed to the banks—was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a stimulus bill that was more than half tax cuts and that may have been the kiss of death to bipartisanship in the US Congress. It totaled $787 billion when it was passed in February 2009, but many of its parts wouldn’t take effect for years. That was not enough to make up for what Baker calculated would be a shortfall in annual demand more in the neighborhood of $1.3 trillion in 2009 and 2010.12
Some 8.7 million jobs were lost between the start of the recession in December 2007 and early 2010. The previous record had been 4.3 million lost at the end of World War II. And, as the protesters in Connecticut feared, cities slashed budgets, cutting public services to make up the shortfall in their finances.13
Yet much remains the same. Not a single banker went to jail for the ritualized fraud that had created the crisis. No major financial firm was forced to suffer a cut in the value of its assets. That there were effectively no consequences for these firms, largely because they were described as systemically important, simply encourages more risk-taking, with the expectation that they will be bailed out again. In fact, a 2012 analysis actually quantified the value to the biggest banks on the assumption that taxpayers will foot the bill for their crises. The subsidy provided by that assumption is worth about $76 billion a year to the biggest banks—more than the federal government spends on education.14
The financial sector had grown exponentially in the decades leading up to the crisis—to the point where it accounted for about 40 percent of all corporate profits in the early 2000s, and rebounded from the crash to around 30 percent. And yet it was not very good at doing what it was supposed to do, which is to direct capital toward the best possible investments. Stock trading had little to do with raising money to keep businesses flowing, and more to do with fattening the pockets of the already-wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Keeping the stock price of a company high was more important to the people who ran it than keeping its factories producing or its workforce paid. A J. P. Morgan executive admitted in a 2011 letter to clients that “reductions in wages and benefits explain[ed] the majority” of the increase in profits.15
What Wall Street was very good at was concentrating wealth. Those laid-off workers, or the ones who kept their jobs but found their wages shrinking, had no choice but to rely on credit as a substitute for that lost income—credit, of course, lent from the very same banks, whether that be a shiny gold credit card with “CHASE” across the top or a home equity line of credit, a second mortgage mining your home for cash. Wall Street began to make more of its money from repackaging this debt into “innovative” securities for resale than it did from making loans the old-fashioned way. As the rich got richer, they needed outlets for their investments; as the members of the working class got poorer, they needed money, which they got not in increasing wages for their increasing productivity, but in loans. Growing inequality wasn’t a side effect—it was the main effect.16
The complexity and power of Wall Street served as one more barrier to protest for working people. As financial observer Doug Henwood wrote, a sizable amount of the power wielded by the financial sector comes “from the sense of powerless awe [it inspires] among non-initiates.” Those bonuses being paid to AIG executives who had just participated in a massive crash, and the inability of the banks to fire the people whose actions had led to the problem in the first place, were justified because, bankers said, no one else was qualified to un-create the complicated web of securities they’d created. The rest of us, again, simply could not possibly understand these “toxic” financial products. We could not even understand why these things had been created in the first place—the whole house of cards was meant to hedge against loss, to de-riskify risk, and it had simply increased risk for the rest of us.17
Just as the TARP vote worked to get Congress’s imprimatur on public bailouts for the banks in 2008, the public’s participation in the stock market gave ideological cover to whatever the stock market did: if “the people” supported it, it must be democratic and just. Yet the public’s involvement with Wall Street, while it did grow, has always been overstated: stock ownership is concentrated at the top, with 81 percent of stocks owned by the top 10 percent, and 38 percent of stocks owned by the top 1 percent. Half of all households own no stock whatsoever. Mostly, their entanglement with finance is through debt.18
Sometime during the crisis, Goldstein remembered asking her boss, “How will the public ever forgive us?” His response surprised her. “He was like, ‘The public is going to forget and then everything is going to go back to normal. The public forgot after the long-term capital management hedge funds imploded and the banks bailed them out. They forgot after the savings and loan crisis. It is going to be a little rocky for a while, but don’t worry about it. Everything will go back to normal.’”
Wall Street’s crisis was not simply adjacent to the economic system we live under, but a crisis of capitalism itself. We had been told that deregulating markets would allow markets to work more perfectly, that it would result in better allocation of capital to businesses that would then create jobs for the rest of us, yet the opposite had happened. Since the late 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism had been triumphant, its cheerleaders sure they had prevailed because their system was just and right—and besides, it was the only option. British writer Mark Fisher called this attitude “capitalist realism”; it was the sense that it was now impossible even to imagine an alternative.19
And yet in the days of the crisis, even capitalism’s biggest boosters admitted that it was in danger. Judge, legal scholar, and market devotee Richard Posner titled his book A Failure of Capitalism; financial journalist David Faber subtitled his How Wall Street’s Greed and Stupidity Brought Capitalism to Its Knees. No less august a publication than The Economist ran a story called “Capitalism at Bay.” These prominent voices and so many others discussing capitalism’s flaws got people talking about the system itself, whether it would last, and whether it should. Capitalism had become visible as a manmade system, something that could have an end, something that in fact seemed to have self-destructed.20
A recession was one thing; a crisis that rattled the entire economic system was something very different. The story we’d been told about capitalism triumphant, democratic, and practical was obviously untrue, but political and economic elites seemed to simply have no answers. Capitalist realism was over. The question now was what would happen next.
“THE TEAPOT STARTED BOILING UNDER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION” for Debbie Dooley, a lifelong conservative and resident of Atlanta, Georgia. “I just felt like the Republican Party lost its way and I had major issues with some of Bush’s big government policy. Especially the Wall Street bailout. The Tea Party actually started under the Bush administration, we just didn’t call it a Tea Party.”
But on February 19, 2009, a commentator on CNBC, NBC’s business-oriented cable channel, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, gave Dooley and people like her something to rally around. Rick Santelli, dressed in a suit and yellow tie with traders bustling on all sides of him, ranted about the government “subsidiz[ing] the losers’ mortgages,” to applause from the traders. “This is America!” he shouted, turning to the traders, who all booed. And then he made the call heard round the country: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing. . . . We’re going to be dumping in some derivative securities, what do you think about that?”21
Santelli was responding to the demand for write-downs of mortgages that were “underwater” after the drop in housing values brought on by the crisis; “underwater” mortgages were ones where the homeowner owed more on their mortgage than the house was then worth. But beyond that, he was calling for a rebellion in defense of capitalism, in defense of the idea that the winners and losers had somehow earned what they had. His call resonated with Dooley. “We were still outraged over the Wall Street bailout and here come more bailouts,” she said. “I heard his rant and I said ‘We are going to hold a Tea Party.’”
She was one of twenty-two on the first call to plan for the Tea Party actions that followed. Word of Santelli’s rant and the Tea Party idea spread through the social networking site Twitter and through conservative blogs. Loose networks formed around Twitter hashtags. The first round of Tea Party events came on February 27, 2009, but the one that stood out to Debbie Dooley was in Atlanta on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. “We had twenty thousand people,” she said. “We had [Fox News host] Sean Hannity broadcast there.”22
Though Fox’s competitor, CNBC, had launched the idea of the Tea Party, conservative Fox hosts like Hannity and Glenn Beck quickly jumped into the fray, publicizing Tea Party events and even hosting their own. Dooley helped to plan a march on Washington sponsored by Beck on September 12, 2009, connected to Beck’s “9/12 Project,” which aimed to reclaim the sense of unity Americans felt after the attacks of September 11, 2001. “When I flew into Reagan National the day before, I was overwhelmed,” Dooley said. “You had people wearing Tea Party T-shirts and Tea Party flags that were getting off of planes, unfurling their flags, from all over the United States.”
Dooley became the chairperson of the Atlanta Tea Party and joined the board of directors of Tea Party Patriots, a coordinating organization for the local Tea Party groups that quickly began to dot the country. A fast talker with a thick Georgia accent, she relished the idea of holding disruptive protests and challenging the political elites, expressing pride in the number of times she and the Atlanta group were able to pull together broad coalitions for political battles. She was a firm advocate for shaking up the people who had held power for too long, saying, “I firmly believe that the ruling elite in both the Democrat and Republican Party want to keep us separate. They don’t want the grassroots to work together and discover that We the People have the real power and not these elected officials.”
At the grassroots, the Tea Party became a loose network of local groups, often holding regular meetings to talk politics, plan campaigns, and sometimes hear guest lectures. One study counted approximately 1,000 local groups by the end of 2010. These activists went beyond simply talking to one another online—though the Internet remained central to their work—to engage in face-to-face organizing and action. Dramatic protests at town hall events punctuated the summer of 2009. These meetings, initially arranged by members of Congress during the recess to discuss the pending health-care reform bill, turned into raucous events where Tea Party members shouted at their representatives about the economy and “Obamacare.” Disruption, it turned out, was fun as well as attention-grabbing.23
In the 2000s, online organizing mainly consisted of groups like MoveOn, a progressive organization that mobilized its members through email blasts, mostly to sign petitions, but occasionally to take offline action. Political blogs often had vibrant constituencies, but for the bloggers, the idea of going out and disrupting an event was mostly anathema. There had, of course, been massive marches against the war, but those were planned well in advance, and smaller protests were mostly ignored by the press.
The Tea Partiers used online tools to get together and work toward a political solution. Many were relieved to realize they weren’t alone in their outrage. Where Joe Dinkin and the Working Families Party were cautious about expressing anger, the Tea Party wore that anger on its sleeve. Often, it was directed at the newly elected president, but it was also often aimed at local representatives who were not seen as being responsive enough, because they had acquiesced in the bailouts of the banks, the auto companies, and pretty much everyone who had a private jet to get to Washington and hold out their hands. Dooley called it “crony capitalism” and argued against the government “picking winners and losers.”
Populist anger aimed at elites had once been a tool of the left, but in the post-crash moment it was conservatives who provided a space for that anger to be heard and validated. A president elected on promises of bringing both sides together, of making Washington a less rancorous place, allowed little space for outrage, and those who had supported him clung to the belief that he would help, in time. For someone like J. D. Meadows, angry at Wall Street, seeing only politicians willing to give more bailouts to corporations while jobs disappeared in his hometown in Mississippi, it made sense to join up. The anger that the Tea Party embraced was central to its appeal.
The Tea Party’s skepticism of elites shaped its structures, keeping its organization loose and relatively nonhierarchical. Tea Partiers saw themselves as regular people working with their neighbors to take their country (and the Republican Party) back.
A growing sense that the government no longer served everyday people was crystallized by the financial crisis and the bailouts that followed, the impunity granted to those who had caused the economy to crash. Dooley said, “I think that there are some CEOs and presidents of these banks and large corporations, financial institutions, that should be sitting in a jail cell now. I believe if we did the same thing, the average person, we would be in jail.”
The Tea Party blamed bad actors—the buyers of homes they couldn’t afford as well as the bankers who came open-handed for bailouts—rather than capitalism itself, for the crisis. The particular confidence in free markets and deregulation that emanated from the Tea Party was deeply connected to the sense that government was no longer functioning as it should. If the state was incapable of punishing the people who broke the economy, it could at least have let the market do its job and let the banks fail. While that message dovetailed quite nicely with the one that had been promoted for years by groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, or indeed by Fox News, it was a mistake to write the Tea Party off as an “AstroTurf” movement created out of whole cloth from above. There was real outrage, and real fear, at its core.24
Yet it is undeniable that Fox News—and because of it, the rest of the mainstream media—helped the Tea Party grow. The attention initially showered on pockets of resistance, like the Republic Windows and Doors workers or the bus tour to bankers’ homes, had been unexpected, but it was nothing compared to the sustained effort that Fox News put into helping the Tea Party grow. Media scholars have written for decades about the media’s allergy to covering protest movements, particularly those that dare to disrupt the day-to-day theater of politics or business. Yet Fox’s efforts to legitimize the Tea Party paid off in quantifiable ways. Fox coverage promoted events, made special occasions of the protests themselves, and allowed Fox viewers to feel connected to the movement. It described the movement using words like “grassroots,” “independent,” “mainstream,” and “genuine,” making those previously inexperienced with public protest feel comfortable joining up.25
By 2010, other news networks had joined in the fun. CNN even cohosted a debate with the national conservative group Tea Party Express. The Tea Party was the new big thing in American politics, helped along by well-positioned, well-established organizations and elected officials, such as Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who had no problem speaking on behalf of a dispersed, nonhierarchical group of activists. Dooley expressed skepticism about some of these ventriloquists, from Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to the Koch brothers, the billionaires who fund Americans for Prosperity, but there is little doubt that their stars rose because they were able to hitch their brands to the actions of people like her.
Dooley credited the Tea Party with revitalizing protests on both the left and the right. “I think that the people were sleeping giants for years—I think that a lot of activists on the Left, many more became much more engaged than what they were in the past,” she said, and it is hard to argue with her. Joe Dinkin of the Working Families Party remembered looking at Tea Partiers disrupting town hall meetings and wishing they’d had the tools to make their Fairfield County protest spread in the kind of “open-source” manner the Tea Party had. It didn’t hurt that each time the Tea Party did something, Fox News was there to cover it and to tell its audience that this was the righteous anger of a people’s uprising.
At least some Tea Party groups were willing to join with surprising allies in support of shared goals. In Georgia in the fall of 2011, when a state legislator proposed a bill that would criminalize picketing and other protest activities, Dooley and the Atlanta Tea Party teamed up with the Teamsters Union, Occupy Atlanta, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, and many other groups to defeat the bill and preserve their right to take political action. “They have a right to do what they want to do and we have a right, too,” she said of the other groups. Not every Tea Party organization has been so willing to reach out to those not sharing their political views, but they have all affirmed the value of making some noise to affect the political process.
Surveys of the Tea Party—something of a loose term, since not all people who expressed support for the movement were activists, or even members of a local group—repeatedly found its members to be both older and better-off than the average American, as well as much more likely to be white. The Tea Party was a middle-class movement both in its actual makeup and in its politics: its members were not the most likely to have been hurt by the recession, but they were certainly psychologically affected by the crash. When the stock market plunged, so did retirement accounts, alongside the drop in home values caused by the bursting of the housing bubble, hitting Tea Partiers and other older Americans in what had seemed like safe investments.26
The middle-class Tea Partiers were responding to a particular set of fears. The middle class is characterized more and more by what writer Barbara Ehrenreich called the “fear of falling,” the awareness that there is a class below, into which it is possible to slip, as well as a class above, where the real power is concentrated. In the post–World War II era, the booming economy, labor protections, and housing subsidies helped many more people climb into the middle class, but in recent years, many have slipped back out of it. The financial crisis made what had been a hazy awareness into a sharp realization. The rules of the game had changed, and hard work did not necessarily pay off.27
From that feeling emerged the most common refrain of the Tea Party faithful: “We need to take our country back,” back to a time when things were better. This slogan implies, of course, a memory (or an imagined one) of that better time. In this view, our foundation is good, but somewhere along the way, something was broken, and it needs to be fixed. The call to “take our country back” or to “rebuild the American Dream” is a way of protesting social and economic inequalities without having to question the entire political and economic system. Others questioned whether the times the Tea Partiers were invoking were in fact better for everyone.
“Taking our country back” could also have nastier connotations, and surveys found that Tea Party participants, compared to other Americans and even other conservatives, were more willing to agree with stereotypes about black people and immigrants. Obama could seem like the very embodiment of right-wing populist fears: he was black, he was a former community organizer who had worked on behalf of the poor (assumed also to be black), he had a Muslim-sounding middle name and a Kenyan father, and he was also an Ivy League–educated lawyer and a Chicago politician. That combination packed a potent number of stereotypes into one man.
But the distinction between productive citizens and freeloaders that many Tea Partiers voiced has a long history in American populism, and not just the right-wing kind. And so it is not that strange that grassroots Tea Partiers (unlike, often, the politicians or elites who were speaking in their name) distrusted the government but supported Social Security and Medicare—programs they felt they had earned. Populism has always separated the “producer” from the “parasite,” and that tendency has allowed anti-elite movements to be sidetracked into anger toward those at the bottom.
CORE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN POPULISM WAS THE PRODUCER ethic, or “producerism”: the idea that only those who worked hard and created wealth deserved to share in it and to participate in our democracy. “Wealth belongs to him who creates it,” Ignatius Donnelly proclaimed at the 1892 convention in St. Louis that birthed the People’s Party. Donnelly then quoted St. Paul: “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” Producerism sees elites at the top as parasites who leech off the work of others rather than getting their hands dirty themselves. It is fundamentally a moral argument, not a deep analysis of the structures of the economy, though it often hits on vital truths that feel real to many people.28
Though small-p populism existed before the Populist movement of the late 1800s, the demands and goals of that movement have particular echoes in the politics of the post–financial crisis era. A coalition of farmers, wage laborers, and small business owners, the Populists, who eventually formed the People’s Party to make a bid for electoral power, aimed to overthrow what they saw as a corrupt elite and sought to create institutions that would serve them. Members of groups like the National Farmers’ Alliance, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association, the Knights of Labor, the Women’s Alliance, and the Citizen’s Alliance created a political organization that was markedly different from the major political parties of the time.
Taking a slogan from the followers of Andrew Jackson, who had railed against a specifically financial elite, the Populists decried “the money power” and “monopolists,” pointing the finger at bankers like J. P. Morgan as exerting a nefarious control over society through their power over the money supply. They demanded public ownership of national banks, a “Subtreasury System” that would have provided low-cost loans to farmers, and a postal banking system that would have made local post offices into savings bank branches. They wanted public, not corporate, ownership of transportation and communication services, in part to make their own businesses easier to run, and in part because they understood the connection between concentrated economic power and concentrated political power. They called for a national progressive income tax as a challenge to growing inequality. The Populists were less progressive when it came to race; although groups that represented black farmers and laborers were part of the coalition, the movement as a whole did not fundamentally challenge segregation or a belief in white supremacy. They failed to win a presidential election, but they left behind ideas that trickle throughout American politics to this day on both the right and the left.29
In addition to genuine criticisms of concentrated power, American populist movements have targeted scapegoats whose actual power may be limited; they have appealed to a broad idea of “the people,” but they have sometimes worked to silence or demonize certain groups. Rightwing populist language often relies on conspiracy theories about groups within the elite—from alleged communists to academics—who are said to be working to undermine American principles in order to concentrate their own power.30
A kind of white middle-class identity politics developed around the producerist idea that what the middle class had, it had earned, and that it needed to be protected from those above and below who aimed to take its wealth away. Taxes, not wages, became the economic issue of this politics of resentment, which was fueled by segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace and solidified by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. This ideology, espoused often by those who were already in power, figured “elites” not as the “economic royalists” that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had inveighed against in the days of the Great Depression, but as the liberals in government. Richard Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew painted liberals as effete snobs and rallied the “silent majority” against those “who want to take their money, and give it to people who don’t work.”31
This idea resonated because middle-class reform movements that concerned themselves with poverty often did so out of a distant sense of charity rather than a real engagement with the needs of poor people. Yet in targeting liberal politicians and professors, these populists missed the corporate titans who were quietly shipping jobs overseas and keeping wages low while managing to get their own tax rates slashed to a level that redistributed wealth upward far faster than it had been shifting downward.32
As for Santelli, the man who kicked off the Tea Party standing in the midst of the kind of people who had just crashed the economy, one can find his precursors in market populism. Popularized in the 1990s, with capitalism ascendant in the world and socialism vanquished, market populism is the belief that markets, not mere elections, were tools of “the people,” a democratic way—as well as the only way—to organize society.33
The rise of market populism came alongside the massive growth in the financial industry. But it was a populism that mostly left actual people out. It was expressed in magazines and books and on trading floors, and especially in the business press, where managers and day traders were lionized as the real producers and workers the parasites. If you hadn’t made yourself rich in the stock market, the theory went, it was your own fault; and if you didn’t like the market’s priorities for your workplace or your town, you had simply been outvoted. Meanwhile, the bankers on the trading floor, Alexis Goldstein said, considered their clients to be there for the fooling: they were sources of cash, not of democratic power. When those bankers’ actions crashed the markets, the “real economy” crashed, too; and when they demanded their bonuses anyway, a number of Americans realized how undemocratic Wall Street remained.
Producerism remained alive and well. Mitt Romney, during his 2012 run for the presidency, complained that “forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax,” portraying them as nonworkers “dependent upon government.” The claim that the wealthy were the real “job creators” was another form of producerism. And Santelli’s placing of the blame for the crisis not on the traders flanking him, or the bank officers who had pushed low-income people into mortgages they had no dream of paying back, but on the homeowners themselves was another such rhetorical twist: it must be because those homeowners did not work hard enough.34
It is tempting to blame Wallace or Nixon or Reagan for this language, tinged as it is with the kind of stereotyping we expected from those figures. But populism from the beginning was shaped in the image of white working men, making it all too easy to blame those who did not or could not find jobs, whose work was the unpaid labor of raising children or caring for elders, or who had been held back by decades of racial segregation and discrimination.
For too long, it has been far too easy not just to blame the poor for their own problems, but to take a kind of nasty pleasure in their downfall, to feel ourselves virtuous when we wagged our fingers at “welfare queens” or complained about people buying homes beyond their means. If—as we have been told by a thousand pious politicians and newspaper columnists intent on finding a “social psychology” behind the era’s rampant foreclosures, low wages, and unemployment, which in some neighborhoods exceeds 50 percent—it is the fault of those foreclosed upon, jobless, or struggling, then it cannot happen to us. Victim-blaming, like conspiracy theories, is an attempt to understand the world, to find an explanation for why bad things happen.35
But to really prevent those things from happening, to really end poverty and ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth and power, we have to accept the unpleasant fact that, indeed, these are things that could happen to all of us, and often do happen to people who have worked hard and were hit by an unexpected crisis that derailed them financially—like the 2008 downturn. The Tea Party’s response was to double down on producerism, to argue that the problems would be solved by a purer form of capitalism. But for many others, the financial crisis and the resulting precipitous drop in living standards for so many people taught a different lesson: that if the actions of people far away from us can wipe out 40 percent of our wealth in such a brief period of time, perhaps we have more in common with the people we thought were below us than we had previously imagined.36
And in that moment, we saw the rise of a new populist language. Those who spoke it aimed to allow the people to really take power, in order to fix the crises that the people didn’t cause.
THE SIGNS WERE THERE, IF WE CHOSE TO LOOK FOR THEM. OCCUPY Wall Street, the movement that would change the way we talked about the economy, was still in the future. But while the Tea Party seemed to steer people’s anger away from Wall Street, the progressive groups aligned with President Obama shifted to pushing for health-care reform, and the 2010 midterm elections provided the spectacle of candidates promising to create jobs, while denying that government in fact had any ability to create jobs, the anger at the banks that had crashed the economy had not really subsided. In fact, as what many began to call the Great Recession swelled and the unemployed edged closer to the ninety-nine-week cutoff after which even extended unemployment benefits would disappear, that anger might even have been growing.
The question, for organizers and for those looking to move off the political sidelines, was how to turn that anger into something concrete, something that would have actual power.
In 2007 and 2008, the Obama campaign had galvanized a generation of young people to get involved in electoral politics. The campaign gave them unprecedented access to new digital tools as well as training in organizing from career troublemakers such as civil rights and United Farm Workers veteran Marshall Ganz. But after the election, Ganz wrote, Obama refused to use his movement; many fell into disillusionment as the administration repeatedly told them not to act, not to challenge Democrats who wavered on policy goals. “He ignored the leverage that a radical flank robustly pursuing its goals could give a reform president—as organized labor empowered FDR’s New Deal or the civil rights movement empowered LBJ’s Voting Rights Act,” Ganz wrote in 2010. “Threatened with losing access, and confusing access with power, the coalitions for the most part went along.”37
Some organizations kept pushing, though. National People’s Action organized a successful action at the American Bankers Association convention in Chicago in October 2009. “A thousand or so folks came the first night from all across the country,” George Goehl of NPA remembered. “It was like a counter-convention.” They marched to Goldman Sachs’ Chicago office and occupied it, then held a bigger march with support from local unions and other community groups. The “Showdown in America” campaign, which had begun at the ABA meeting in Chicago, culminated in protests at Wells Fargo and Bank of America shareholder meetings and then a march on Wall Street. These protesters were pressing for the bank reform bill winding its way through Congress to have some teeth. On April 29, 2010, thousands marched on Wall Street, linking bankers’ big bonuses to federal and state budget cuts that had resulted in laid-off public employees and slashed services for already-struggling city residents. Labor unions joined NPA and other community groups in the march and the other actions, but the press coverage, particularly in contrast to the fanfare given to the Tea Party, was minimal. The overarching narrative remained that the Tea Party was the only populist game in town.
From within the nation’s biggest labor unions, which would have seemed the natural groups to challenge Wall Street power, lifelong organizer Stephen Lerner also found directing attention and action at the financial crisis and its perpetrators an uphill battle. Within unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the necessity of confronting finance was far from a consensus opinion, and there was a reluctance to challenge the president. “There was a group of us that were obsessed that saw this as being really big. I think most folks didn’t get how big it was,” said Lerner, who’d begun to look at Wall Street while organizing the Justice for Janitors campaign. The shock of the crisis, it seemed, was still an influence, preventing people from seeing the whole picture.
Still, they kept pushing. “Our theory kept evolving to be ‘No more single actions,’” Goehl said. “Yes, we wanted to win financial reform, but we really wanted to spark a movement.” Their marches were coupled with more confrontational actions, such as entering and occupying bank headquarters and demanding to meet with bank executives. Multiday, multicity actions steamrolled forward, and, Goehl said, NPA members had a real hunger for big ideas about the structure of the economy.
Younger people were also beginning to take action, and in many cases their political beliefs had been indelibly shaped by the 2008 crisis. Mary Clinton moved from North Dakota to New York after spending 2010 working as an organizer at SEIU, first around health-care reform and then, briefly, on financial reform. But she was frustrated to find herself working to elect Democrats, rather than for deeper change. For many in her generation, mainstream Democrats were part of the problem. She’d been involved in the 2009 protests at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit of the leaders of the world’s largest economies, and she credited that event with sharpening her understanding of global capitalism and inequality.
As a graduate student at the City University of New York, Clinton joined the New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts coalition and participated in the May 12, 2011, protests on Wall Street. “It was very clear that in Bloomberg’s New York, it’s Wall Street running the city,” she said. But simply marching, as NPA was also realizing, was not enough. “I thought, being nice isn’t good for negotiations around budget cuts,” she said. “We need more confrontation, we need direct action.”38
The protests in Wisconsin in the winter of 2011 in defense of public-sector union workers inspired the New York group, as did the movement in Spain against the austerity measures instituted in response to the economic crisis there. In both places, protesters had camped out and occupied public space—so Clinton and others decided to have their own encampment. “Bloombergville” was named after “Walkerville” in Wisconsin, which in turn took its name from the Hoovervilles that sprang up during the Great Depression, named for the president whose inaction had made the crisis worse. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a billionaire whose wealth came from the Bloomberg terminals that finance traders used to analyze information and make trades. There was no better symbol for the intimate relationship between Wall Street and government. “This was an opportunity where we could be confrontational, do something that was right on the doorstep of the mayor and capital,” Clinton said.
Bloombergville lasted from June 14 to July 5, 2011, coinciding with city budget negotiations, and disbanded after the city budget passed. About one hundred people slept out the first night, and while the crowd never grew to the size of the one in Wisconsin, and the press coverage didn’t swell as it had for the Tea Party, the protest had left an idea in the heads of its participants.
When the Canadian magazine Adbusters put out a call to occupy Wall Street, many Bloombergville veterans seized on the idea. Finding no meetings or planning events scheduled, Clinton and a group within New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts called for one.39
Many people have claimed credit for coming up with the phrase “We are the 99 percent” at one of those early assemblies to plan Occupy. What cannot be argued is that the phrase struck a chord with people who heard it. Something crystallized in that simple phrase that seemed to allow people to discuss subjects that had formerly been taboo. It expressed a solidarity that terms like “middle class” or “regular people” or “Main Street” or even “working class” did not, while pointing the finger at the oligarchs, financiers, and miscellaneous multimillionaires hoarding the wealth.
In this view, inequality—not simple concern about poverty, or unemployment, but the sense that a small group of ultra-rich were consolidating even more wealth and political power in their hands—was the problem. Occupy gave us the language for it. CEOs had gotten a 23 percent raise in 2010. Profits were up 22 percent since 2007, and the lowest share of economic growth in thirty years had gone to the wages and salaries of the employees who worked at those companies. The transfer of public wealth into private hands that had occurred over the past several decades, combined with the collapse of real incomes, the rise in debt, the disconnection of rising productivity from rising wages, all of it had contributed to the creation of a concentration of capital that economist Thomas Piketty a few years later suggested might be incompatible with modern democratic society.40
Messages don’t succeed because they say something new and exciting that no one has ever heard before; instead, they succeed because they explain something that people feel but have been at a loss to explain. With the discussion of inequality, the shock, the lack of an explanation for the events of the past few years, finally ended. It was, in a way, like a fog had cleared. Our problem was not simply that we were struggling, but that our struggling benefited someone else.
Communications researcher Anat Shenker-Osorio pointed out that even the 99 percent framework was not new—The Other 98% was a progressive organization that held its first action on Tax Day 2010, one of the many groups aiming to catalyze anger at the state of the economy, but it had not taken off in the same way. The difference, said Shenker-Osorio, was that unlike “the other,” the phrase “We are the 99 percent” gave people a positive identity, a big inclusive group to be in.
It both echoed and fundamentally shifted classic populist rhetoric. “We are the 99 percent” was a clear evocation of the power of the people, an anti-elite rallying cry of action. Significantly, it included everyone—not just the “middle class” or the workers, but the unemployed and the homeless and the poor as well. For a country often described as hopelessly aspirational, whose fundamental myth was the “American Dream” and the idea that everyone who worked hard could achieve, it was a radical step. It caused people to identify downward, with the poorest people. It cut out the possibility of turning producers against “moochers,” those who needed unemployment assistance or food stamps or public housing. There was one enemy, and it was the people who had caused the economy to crash. Which side, the slogan asked, did you want to be on?
To Mary Clinton, a key piece of Occupy’s early success was that it was new, and it was not called by an established community group or labor union or organization. You didn’t have to be a member of something; as Occupy organizer Nelini Stamp pointed out, all you had to agree to was that the banks had too much power. Ruth Milkman, a sociologist who studied Occupy along with her colleagues Penny Lewis and Stephanie Luce at the City University of New York, also noted the importance of painting a clear target directly on the villains of Wall Street. And yet prior actions targeting bankers, from the Working Families Party’s bus tour to the Showdown in America, had not spread across the country. In the end, just as it is impossible to assign credit to an individual for the slogan, it is also impossible to explain just why it took off.
Milkman, Lewis, and Luce tracked the rise in mentions of “income inequality” in the media at the time of Occupy, watching it spike from just over 1,000 mentions in August 2011 to nearly 4,000 in October, during Occupy’s peak. In a Pew Institute survey taken in December 2011, 61 percent of respondents said they thought the country’s economic system “unfairly favors the wealthy,” and 77 percent (and 53 percent of Republicans) agreed that “there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations.” Another survey found a 19 percentage point increase in people who thought there were “strong” or “very strong” conflicts between the rich and poor. “It’s a cliché to say it, but it totally changed how you could talk about things,” Lerner said. “It would be fun to think about all the money that’s been spent and all the things labor and progressives have tried that didn’t equal anything and then look at the money and the time and energy and compare it to Occupy.”41
The expression of solidarity that “We are the 99 percent” offered, that we were all in this together, allowed people to move beyond the easy politics of moral superiority or purity. One did not have to be the perfect victim in order to be part of the 99 percent any more than one had to be a producer. With one slogan, it appeared that Occupy had both pointed the finger squarely at the rich and gathered the other classes together in opposition.
It was the audacity of Occupy that seemed to work, a slogan and a strategy that seemed, finally, expansive enough to tackle the crisis.
WHILE IT WAS OCCUPIED, NO ONE CALLED IT ZUCCOTTI PARK. IT WAS Liberty Plaza, the name taken from the street in New York’s financial district that bordered it on one side and in homage to the occupied squares in Egypt, Spain, and Greece. The site of the original occupation had been almost accidental, a second or third choice when the police had thoroughly barricaded Wall Street. And yet the space seemed perfect, at least at first; within it, there were always many things happening simultaneously.
I first made it to Occupy Wall Street on Day 5, September 21, 2011, and met an emergency medical technician volunteering her skills. She told me, “So far we’ve given out lots of Band-Aids, because everyone has blisters, lots of cough drops because nobody has a voice.” There was a small group screen-printing Occupy slogans on T-shirts on one of the park’s stone tables, and there was a sign for a child-care center, though no children were currently there. There was a fully stocked kitchen. At any given time, there might be a march departing, whether to head down to the real Wall Street half a block away or simply to lap the park, making some noise. At each end of the park, protesters stood holding cardboard handwritten signs, including “Collective liberation,” “Too big to fail?,” and “NYPD: Wall Street is After Your Pension!”
No one paid much attention to the occupation for the first few days. Then the police made a few mistakes—pepper-spraying a girl in the face in front of the live-streaming cameras on several occupiers’ cellphones, then, on Saturday, October 1, arresting some seven hundred people marching across the Brooklyn Bridge—and it was on.
Mary Clinton remembered that on the first day, September 17, there was yoga in the park and a folk musician playing before the march set off. Kept out of Wall Street, they turned into Zuccotti Park, held a general assembly, and stayed.
Most participants you ask about Occupy remember the organic way things happened. How the food station grew from a food committee that prepared peanut butter sandwiches the first night. How donations started to come in and committees began to decide how to spend the money. How the library grew, and people deemed themselves librarians. How the celebrities and famous leftists began to show up and speak, from Roseanne Barr to Naomi Klein to Angela Davis. How the unions began to show up, and how the protesters began to support them in return. Of course it was work, the hard work of committed organizers who spent their time sleeping in a park. But after waiting for something to happen for years, people had finally managed to make it happen.
Nelini Stamp thought it was going to be just another protest—at the time, she was an organizer with the Working Families Party, and she had been to plenty of marches. “But I saw something that was different,” she said. “I saw dedicated people who had been so disenfranchised their entire lives, finally feeling like they had a voice.” She wound up sleeping on a piece of cardboard in the park the first night, and staying.
Alexis Goldstein had quit her Wall Street job in 2010, disgusted by the financial crisis but unsure what she would do next. She was teaching some coding classes and considering a career developing computer and iPhone products. The video of the police pepper-spraying the girls drove her to the park, where she began to think more deeply about her time on Wall Street. When Naomi Klein gave a talk on Wall Street, a person next to Goldstein asked, “What’s Glass-Steagall?” She found herself explaining the Depression-era law, repealed in 1999, that kept investment banking separate from the day-to-day banks most people use, and realized that her knowledge as a former Wall Streeter could be helpful. The next day, she held a teach-in on the finance industry.
The movement went viral, spreading across the country in weeks. According to one count, from the original occupation in New York, Occupy quickly mushroomed to over six hundred encampments around the country, with at least one in every state. Mary Clinton was excited when she found out that people in her home state of North Dakota had begun planning their occupation—the last state to start a camp. The smallest town to have one may have been Mosier, Oregon, population 430.42
The desire to occupy public space, to camp out and create what political analyst and writer Matt Stoller called a “church of dissent,” was common to post–financial crisis protests the world over. It was a response to the privatization of public space and services of the past few decades as well as a way to get beyond the deeply isolating way that the crisis seemed to operate; as politicians brayed that all was well, it was easy to feel as though you were a unique failure. The decline of social institutions, from labor unions to political and ethnic clubs, had left people longing for connection once again. “It was kind of a shot in the arm,” Alexis Goldstein said. “Our system isn’t working. People are frustrated. There is corruption that we don’t know how to vote out of office, because it is everywhere. We want to put a flag in the ground and stake our own new society temporarily for a very small geographic space.”43
In holding the space, the occupiers gave outrage a location. While many people moved into the camps, many others were able to be a part of the movement simply by dropping by once in a while, attending a general assembly, eating a sandwich, joining a march, hearing a lecture, or becoming part of a “working group” addressing everything from the continued need for food and blankets to planning direct action.
Institutional public spaces were the domain of existing elites. Even Zuccotti Park, a part-public, part-private space maintained by Brookfield Properties, was not free of elite influence, though the unique rules that kept such public-private spaces open in New York were what allowed the encampment to stay. A people feeling increasingly disconnected from the way politics operated also felt left out or locked out of the public spaces designated as the locations for political debate. Instead, they carved out their own space, and in it created a society that had books and lectures, good food, committees for comfort, cleanup, security, and free medical care. It accepted everyone. It didn’t require your money, though the constant flow of donations from outside, from individuals as well as supportive institutions like labor unions and community groups, allowed it to keep existing as a space where cash was unnecessary.
The space was never without tensions: between those who slept there and held the space and those who went home to beds at night, between different groups with different goals—and the ever-present standoffs with the ever-present police. When the tents began to go up in Zuccotti Park, the communal feeling of the space changed, and there was a limit to how long major cities were going to allow protest camps to exist in their midst. Yet the spaces allowed something to grow, something that felt new.
You didn’t have to wait for permission to declare yourself part of Occupy. You simply did it. As Mary Clinton said, you could be part of it just by thinking it, by submitting your story to one of the blogs that turned up, like the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr page. Perhaps the most compelling part of the movement, and the one that most confused outside observers, was the commitment to “horizontalism,” often misdefined as leaderlessness or structurelessness.
Horizontalism at its base was a declaration that no one in the movement was more important than anyone else; its appeal seemed to answer some deep need in people who had been burned time after time by political and economic elites or by bosses who denigrated and fired them. It was fueled by the same kind of skepticism of elites that had driven the Tea Party’s structure, but heightened by ideals that had come from anarchism, feminism, and the 1990s movement against rapacious trade policies. The movement had come together in response to three years of failure by elected officials to deal with the Great Recession and an increased sense that the government had responded to and bailed out the rich but left everyone else to figure out their own solutions as best they could. Doing things for yourself—not waiting for permission, as Clinton said—was key.
For the young occupiers, especially, Ruth Milkman noted, it was almost completely anathema to talk about electoral politics as making any significant change. “There’s almost no circumstance under which they can imagine taking that seriously, which is not true for the older people who see the limitation of it and also see the uses of it,” Milkman said. The Tea Party, in contrast, made up mostly of older people, had consciously worked to influence elections.
There was another structure that contributed to the movement’s horizontalism as well: the Internet. While holding public space was key, without the Internet, and in particular, social media like Facebook and Twitter, the movement would not have spread, let alone gone real-world viral the way it did. On the Internet, horizontality is the norm, and leadership beside the point, and Occupy was shaped by this as well. Goldstein described it in computer-programming terms: “It is this idea of an API. Here is a set of tools that you can use to do a thing. And anyone can do it. You can just use my toolkit.”44
The movement began on the Internet when people saw the Adbusters call, and Facebook invitations were key to making the occupation happen. Clinton remembered adding people who had RSVP’d to the Adbusters event and messaging them as Occupy Wall Street, asking if they were coming, if they needed a ride, what they could bring. The Occupy email address at one point was getting messages every six minutes—mostly, at the beginning, from people who had suggestions for what the movement needed to do. The challenge, Clinton said, was getting people to make their ideas happen themselves, rather than bringing suggestions for other people to enact. But at meetings, there would often be a moment when someone else would say, “I had that idea too!” “When you connect those people, then you have strength,” she said.
Goldstein agreed. “At first I was like, ‘Why don’t they X, Y, Z?’” she said. “Then I just became involved and started doing what matched my particular skillset.” That included getting “Occupy the SEC” started, and cowriting a comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission that helped shape financial regulation. Writ large, that was how the movement spread, as people who wanted to see an occupation in their hometown simply made it happen.
Social media served the movement well when it came to getting around the mainstream media: when at first the movement was ignored, and then misrepresented by reporters who didn’t understand that there was no leader to contact, occupiers simply told their own stories. The prevalence of smartphones and new, easy live-streaming technology allowed protesters to capture actions as they were happening and share them in real time on Twitter. One study captured Occupy-related Tweets beginning October 12, 2011, and observed some 120,000 Occupy-related Tweets on a typical day that November; it found a peak of over 500,000 when the police raided Zuccotti Park on November 15.45
Many protest campaigns in recent years have revolved around personal storytelling, and like those campaigns, Occupy did broadcast personal tales of woe, particularly on the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr page. But there was also something new in the way Occupy communicated itself to the world. It was less about the personal stories and more about writing the history of the movement as it was happening. The media was just another failed institution to the occupiers, who operated on the maxim of former punk singer Jello Biafra: “Don’t hate the media; become the media.”
Occupy was shaped by what British journalist Paul Mason noted were “the very values of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy.” In other words, it was shaped in some ways by the very thing against which it protested.46
And yet for many within the movement, it was not about reforming or tinkering with capitalism: they wanted something else, something better. To Mary Clinton, talking about capitalism was like finally addressing the elephant in the room. It made it possible to discuss inequality and power, and it didn’t seem to scare people off as they had been warned it might. Even Clinton’s father, a Fox News fan, told her he was proud of her time with Occupy.
Where Occupy’s best-known slogan, “We Are the 99 Percent,” was populist, its day-to-day structure was shaped as much by anarchist practices. Decisions were made by consensus rather than by majority rule—everyone had to agree, or at least decide not to disagree publicly, for an action to be taken. Hand signals were used at the general assemblies where those decisions were made; people “twinkled” their fingers in the air pointing upward if they agreed or voted yes, pointed down for no, or pointed straight out in front if they were iffy on the subject. They crossed their arms on their chests for a “block”—something beyond a no vote, designed to halt debate.
An early innovation, created when amplified sound was banned in Zuccotti Park, became one of the movement’s most memorable practices—the “people’s mic,” where listeners would repeat back a speaker’s words, sentence by sentence, to ensure everyone could hear. The people’s mic cut down on speechifying; it functioned itself as a sort of consensus process, bringing people together in what they had to say. Manissa McCleave Maharawal wrote of the experience, “There is something intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people, but . . . it is even more intense when that crowd is repeating everything you say. . . . Hearing yourself in an echo chamber means that you make sure your words mean something because they are being said back to you as you say them.”47
The people’s mic also turned into a tactic for disruption when protesters began to use it to shut down events taking place in other venues. An Occupy offshoot that worked on education issues used it to great effect early on, particularly in December 2011 at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting in New York. Occupiers called out “Mic check!” and then rose, person after person, to speak their minds about the mayor’s education policy. One protester is easy to remove; many of them, each repeating the other, is much harder.
The consensus process became more and more unwieldy as the movement grew; it was hard to make decisions on little things when hundreds of people felt compelled to have a vote. Occupy struggled with making its processes work, and most of its offshoots moved away from consensus models. Yet when it did work, it was compelling to watch—hundreds of twinkling fingers in the dark, hundreds of voices chiming in unison.
Occupy’s lack of a singular demand was often criticized, both in the mainstream media and by the older left. But Nelini Stamp argued that it was also what drew people in. “There are no demands, so if I don’t agree with you that’s okay.” The occupations were spaces for generating ideas and demands, spaces for experimentation and communication. By their end they had perhaps overshadowed their reason for existing, but they demonstrated the deep desire for a new form of politics in which people felt included, not excluded.
The Zuccotti Park occupation might have had its best moment at 5:45 a.m. on Friday, October 14. Mayor Bloomberg had declared that the park would be emptied so that it could be cleaned. The occupiers, in response, had gone on a cleaning binge of their own; the people’s mic had echoed, “We are now creating a society that we envision for the world. Being responsible for ourselves is at the heart of that.” Emails rocketed out from supportive organizations, ranging from MoveOn to the AFL-CIO. Everyone I ran into that morning said the same thing: “I knew I had to be there.”
When the unions arrived that morning, it felt like the beginning of a war. Richard Kim of The Nation compared the moment to the scene in Lord of the Rings when the elves arrive at the last battle. There were the orange shirts of the laborers, blue for United Auto Workers, red for National Nurses United. I scribbled notes and circled the park, waiting for the police to arrive, choking down a dry bagel from a food truck. In line behind me at the truck were a man in a clerical collar, another man in a keffiyeh, and a Santa Claus. The line between protester and press was gone at that moment. We all simply wondered what would happen.48
I saw the announcement on Twitter first, from my friend Phillip Anderson: “Looks like @MikeBloomberg just blinked. Hard. Brookfield postpones cleaning of #LibertyPlaza.”49
Ragged-voiced, Nelini Stamp was in the center of three waves of the people’s mic, reading from the message that had just been received. “They are postponing their cleaning! The reason why is they believe they can work out an arrangement with us, but also—because we have a lot of people here!”
In front of me, a burly man in a bright orange laborers’ union shirt held up his phone so that his mother, a veteran of the movements of the 1960s, could hear the cheers erupting.
“This is power,” he told me.