By Brian Carroll
in New York
It’s 2am Wednesday in the dark, cavernous bar beneath the Fat Black Pussycat Club in Greenwich Village. Cori, a psychic, reads my right palm and tells me I will have a long and healthy life. I’m sceptical. It seems to be the prevailing mood now, not just in New York but almost everywhere else.
Earlier, the mood was high, in every sense, in Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken over a concrete plaza at the heart of New York’s financial district in the shadow of One Liberty Plaza, just a stone’s throw from Ground Zero.
As the smell of marijuana wafted through one corner of the 3,000 square metre park, and Buddhists chanted gently in another, Reverend Jesse Jackson stood at the north end and whipped a crowd of about 2,000 into a frenzy. All around, the park was flanked by the NYPD and the satellite vans of international TV crews.
As I wandered through the camp with Black Feather, a 19-year-old Brooklyn-born drop-out who now lives full-time in Zuccotti Park, people queued for free meals at the protester-staffed 'canteen'. Others lined up to peddle a bike that drives the generator that powers the media centre which manages their Facebook, two Twitter feeds, and multiple websites. The group has amassed a war chest of $300,000 from public donations. Sponsors have donated everything from 4,000 free pairs of shoes, to free Wi-Fi in the park.
Black Feather’s real name is Christian Gabriel Ruiz. Black Feather is his tribal name, he tells me, but even if he was dressed with Indian feathers in his afro, barefoot and stripped naked to the waist with war paint daubed on his back, it didn’t seem politically correct to call him Black. I called him Christian.
Black Feather left his college course in engineering five weeks ago because he ‘no longer believed in currency’. A core of 300 protestors like him have been sleeping in tents or under makeshift tarpaulins in Zuccotti Park since September 17. Sara Burghardt, 26, took a week off from her work as an organic farmer in San Diego, California, to come and sleep in Zuccotti Park. It rained all day Wednesday in lower Manhattan, and many protesters left for the dry refuge of nearby McDonalds and Starbucks outlets, but not Sara.
"I've slept here for four nights now. It gets a little cold at night, and I'm a woman here by myself, but as far as safety I felt really comfortable. Never in my lifetime have I experienced people from all walks of life, all different types of people, age groups, racial groups, distribution of wealth groups, coming together and having a dialogue about our society and starting to brainstorm solutions about how we can actually change it. First it's about building community and empowering people with ideas that we don't have to live this way, we really don't."
Aided by the constant police presence, including a freshly installed CCTV camera mounted on a crane overlooking the park, the atmosphere in Zuccotti Park is safe at night. In the evenings, 'facilitators' listen to policy proposals at a General Assembly meeting - the group has no 'leaders' or spokespersons. Afterwards, food is distributed at the canteen. Others take books from a library set up in the north eastern corner of the square. Everything from large bottles to bin tops are used as musical instruments, as drummers rouse the protesters into chants of 'Hell no, We Won't Go.' Then the drumming stops and the passers-by leave, and the camp settles down for the night, settling into groups of four or five, some smoking joints, others playing guitars and singing, the majority talking among themselves about politics and the world.
In the morning, there are workshops to discuss various proposals - such as Occupy Halloween, where artists in the group plan to design giant puppets highlighting their cause. The protesters rise in straggles, some searching a central clothing area - where donated items are kept - for dry items to wear. Socks and shoes are hugely in demand as 'trench foot' has afflicted many of the protesters. You see them in the mornings, wrapping their feet in plastic, taping them up, before another day of Occupation.
Holding a sign declaring that Congress is a rigged casino, Valerie Bach, a 42-year-old manager of a New York comedy store, stands at the north end of the park, engaging passers-by in political debate.
‘It’s not a Republican or Democratic issue, it’s more people are just sick and tired of the country not being run for working people. People are being taken advantage of. It’s only the one per cent who are being taken care of. It’s time for the government to take notice. People around the world feel they are not being listened to. In Ireland your banks were bailed out and it was the same thing here. Everybody was bailed out but individuals aren’t being bailed out.
‘This group is not just the crazy people you see in the media. For the most part, a lot of people are like myself, working class, concerned about our futures, that by the time I retire there probably won’t be a pension.'
Unlike Ireland, where middle class anger over our €73bn bank bailout has never translated into civil disobedience, here people have taken to the streets, protesters occupying public spaces in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Washington DC, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, Texas, California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Washington State.
Protestors like Black Feather have inspired ‘Occupy’ protests on four continents, in 900 cities from Sydney to London, Rome to Berlin, and now, in Dublin and Cork. And where the numbers at Dublin's Central Bank plaza might be dwarfed by the hundreds here, our bank bailout was proportionately seven times greater. The U.S. Government used $700bn of taxpayers’ money to bail out banks, insurance companies, and automobile behemoths like General Motors and Chrysler in 2008/9. CNN recently estimated that if they had followed Ireland’s course, the figure would have been $5 trillion.
As in Ireland, resentment lingers among ordinary taxpayers who have lost jobs, and in 980,000 cases this year alone, lost homes. Almost 46 million Americans out of a population of 312 million - almost 15 percent - receive food stamps.
Here in New York, the protesters wear T-shirts and headscarves pronouncing themselves as "The 99%”, as opposed to the elite one per cent - the 12,000 households who between them earn more money than 24 million of the poorest American households. Middle Class American families now earn on average $3,600 less than they did ten years ago. The 99 percent feel they can no longer look to their politicians for change. They want to form their own political movement, chiming with austerity riots in Greece, disaffected Germans frustrated by having to bailout their less industrious eurozone colleagues, the Indignados protesting in Italy and France, and the rioters who plan to converge on the G20 summit in Cannes next month.
Meanwhile, the US banks return to profits. Wells Fargo, which has imposed new monthly fees on its regular customers, made €2.98billion profit in the last three months alone. These profits were boosted in part by the bank’s low-cost purchase of a €800m commercial property portfolio from Bank of Ireland. That’s a property portfolio which Bank of Ireland sold at a discount to get it off the books. Who bears the loss? The Irish taxpayer. The protesters in Zuccotti Park feel it's always the ordinary people who pay the price, and not those who caused the global financial crisis in the first place.
President Barack Obama has already felt the backlash as the Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and only marginally missed out on retaking the Senate in the 2010 midterm elections. Political analysts in the US are comparing the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Tea Party, a collective of disaffected conservatives who coalesced via Twitter to promote their views, and helped the Republicans score those massive congressional gains. Now, Obama and the Democratic Party are desperate to harness the disenfranchised liberals in the Occupy Wall Street moment to try and secure a second presidential term next year - but Obama is deeply unpopular even in Zuccotti Park. The very people who put the first black American president in the White House have abandoned Obama’s ‘audacity of hope’ for the reality of life - half of Congress are millionaires themselves, elected with campaign finance provided by big corporations.
The prevailing mood is that Obama has sold out to big business. Less than three months away from the first primary in the 2012 Presidential Elections, Obama’s Yes We Can optimism has been supplanted by bitter cynicism.
There are any number of valid arguments for the Zuccotti Park protests, but protesters like Black Feather are angry at how the media portrays them. I remind him that he's half-naked with feathers in his hair, but accept, after spending a few days in the park, that this group is as diverse as New York itself. For every protestor with a tattooed face, for every Rastafarian, for every buxom barefoot blonde singing about love and peace, there are as many ordinary workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, all of whom have joined to protest. The ones who work just tend to go home at night. So is this Occupy Wall Street - ™ The 99% - just some great gathering of feckless, lazy crusties and hippies, Woodstock with a lap-top? No. Just like the protesters I encountered in Greece and Reyjkavic this year and in 2010, the people taking a stand here include many ordinary middle class people.
Irish-American, Victoria Hudson, 57, is one of them. A mother of two daughters, one a school teacher and the other a healthcare advocate, she works part-time as a nurse, and has come to Zuccotti Park half a dozen times in the past fortnight.
“I’m here because I’m outraged that we spend trillions of dollars invading countries that we have no business being in while 50,000 Americans die every year from lack of health insurance. When this Wall Street occupation happened, it released my feelings of despair and futility about the way the world is going. I’m from Charity town in New York. I take a nice train ride down from the suburbs, I hold up my sign and I listen to the general assembly meeting. I’m from an Irish Catholic family. I had nine brothers and sisters and I was thought to share and share alike and always help the least among you and that’s why I can’t stand living in a country that treats people this way.
‘I identify with the protesters a great deal even though they are mostly in their twenties. It’s spread around the world, but nothing will come of it unless people are politically organised.’
Mary Hudson, 65, and a retired teacher, believes it’s too late for Obama: ‘The special interests and corporations have completely bought off Congress. We have to do something. I have a grandson now. We need to save the planet for human beings, not for the tiny minority who are completely out of touch, earning obscene amounts of money. I voted for Obama the last time but I will not again. Absolutely not. I’m one of those millions angry at Obama for promising change when he knew he wasn’t going to deliver anything. I don’t think the Republicans will do any better, but we can go down the drain quickly with the Republicans or slowly with the Democrats. The world doesn’t have time anymore. Something drastic has to happen.’
For many in the camp, the tipping point came in late August when Republicans shot down Obama’s plans to fund a $447bn jobs plan via a new 5.6% tax on those earning over $1m a year. US national debt stands at $14.8 trillion, with China its biggest creditor. The obvious thing to do is to cut spending and raise taxes - something demanded by Standards & Poors which downgraded US debt in August - but instead, Republicans shot down new taxes for the rich, and instead voted to raise the debt ceiling. It was a moment of absolute clarity for a lot of Americans, that even in the face of the US facing default for the first time in its history, big business comes first. Even Warren Buffet, estimated to worth $47bn, decried the failure to increase taxes on the rich - going so far as to publish his tax returns, showing he paid just 17.4% tax last year on an income of $63m last year. His employees paid between 33% and 41% tax. Buffet said the rich were 'coddled'.
"While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks," Buffett said
In 1967, a man called William Black bucked the system in a similar way. He was offered $1m dollars to vacate his lease on a shop at the southeastern corner of what is now Zuccotti Park. Developers needed him out to build the skyscraper at number 1 Liberty Plaza which now overshadows the park. Black refused and made the developers wait 13 years before his lease ran out. His shop was called Chock Full O' Nuts. His spirit of resistance is alive and well.
ends
Part Two Monday:
‘I’m against the bullshit from the establishment who call us a mindless mob. They say we are out of control. Fasting is the purest way of showing control. I want to show everybody, the world, that we are in control. I lost my business last October, then I lost my Cadillac Escalade, and now I’m about to lose my house.” - Recaiifk Enber, 57, who is on hunger strike in Zuccotti Park.