Before reading about what is happening on the streets of cities throughout America, it’s a good idea to take a look at the website www.occupywallst.org. The site’s logo – an uplifted fist tagged with stark red and black letters OccupyWallStreet – says a lot on a basic visual level.
Hostile Whirlwinds
“Greed killed the American dream” reads one of the signs. The Occupy Wall Street protest movement began on September 17 in the heart of American business – on Wall Street, the address of the New York Stock Exchange. Over the four centuries of this street’s existence, it has witnessed a lot, and it is no coincidence that from this narrow and almost medieval-like winding street lined on both sides by skyscrapers opens a view upon a surprisingly beautiful gothic church – the Trinity Church. Business, after all, is a nerve-wracking affair…
But this time neither the church, nor the charming downtown coffee shops, nor the warm and welcome New York autumn has been able to calm the reaction to the economic crisis, which at present is has reached rather calamitous proportions, as even President Barack Obama admits. That very same Brooklyn Bridge, which provides a splendid view on East River, Manhattan and Brooklyn and across which tourists and enraptured couples often stroll, was occupied by residents of the city on October 5 and has now long lost its romantic air. That day saw the arrest of 700 demonstrators, with the clubs and tear gas coming out to subdue particularly zealous protesters. The demonstrators have since moved there base about three and a half kilometers away to Washington Square Park in the Heart of Greenwich Village.
My acquaintance Misha, an architect, to part in the protest march together with his wife Zhenya, an artist and schoolteacher. This is what he had to say: “The scheme of the protests includes permanent camping in the park and marches throughout the week and on the weekends. We went on Wednesday when NYU, Columbia and Parsons joined along with certain unions (for example, the Teachers Union). Occupy Wall Street is like the American version of the Dissenters… I went because I think that free medical insurance is an elementary human right.”
Zhenya notes that they spent that day together with “adults, youth, retirees, blacks, whites, reds and yellows. With children and without children. It is clear that everyone has had enough.”
“There were practically no arrests on that day… At least I didn’t see any,” Misha adds. “The police? What about the police? If you climb over a fence, they’ll arrest you. If you lash out, you’ll get peppered in the face. It’s just their rotten job. No one was yelling: ‘Bad cop is a dead cop.’ The main reason for the protests in the banks and not the cops.”
By the way, according to the New York Police Department, all of these preservers of the peace will receive their $2 million in rightfully earned overtime pay, which will once again be billed to the taxpayers.
A pointless rebellion?
The aim of the protests, according to the demonstrators, is to fight against the unfair financial situation in the country. For many, neighboring Canada, which was once considered dismal semi-socialist state, has become an example to be followed. “Capitalism doesn’t work” – the slogans say. People have grown weary of being unprotected and at risk of losing their jobs and roof over their heads at any moment. Today the idea if healthy competition and earning honest millions seems ephemeral – something only possible for rare geniuses like Steve Jobs, was death on October 5 coincided with the active day of protests.
The demonstrators accuse the financial elite of the United States of causing the crisis that overcome the country and the world. They are expressing their dissatisfaction with the lending system and mortgages and are against reduction of social expenditures. The icing on the cake was news from Mayor Bloomberg’s office that 672 school workers were laid off on October 7. And although there were no teachers among them, they included tutors and school coordinators. Given a general unemployment level of 9.1%, this news very disheartening.
“God preserve us from seeing Russian revolt, senseless and merciless,” warned Pushkin. In essence, the revolt of any people can become as such – senseless and merciless, if people are moved by very serious reasons to come out of their comfortable abodes. And Americans it turns out are finding evermore reasons not just to come out of their homes but also to lose them, as banks are seizing housing where residents failed to make mortgage payments on time. I remember how they locked up an apartment in which my friend Viktor, a graphic designer, lived. It’s a good thing that he had an office, as that’s where he stayed for about two years until he saved up enough money for anther apartment. Being single also helped him survive. What’s someone to do when he has an entire family dependent on him?
“I get the impression that I am spitting in some enormous, bottomless well,” Lena, a singer, tells me. She has been struggling for the past five years to pay for her house in Framingham, Massachusetts. “The money mainly goes toward paying the interest, and then there are water and electricity bills. At the same time the value of the house is declining, so we can’t sell it – if we abandon the house we will still own the bank.”
Ever more Americans are losing their homes, which they invested in and once thought of as their own. If you manage to keep your job, there remains a sense that it is impossible to pay off an enormous loan that can be as much as twice the present value of your apartment. For example, a friend of mine’s husband, a successful programmer, 15 years ago purchased an apartment in a luxury apartment building for $500,000, but now its value has come down to $250,000. But he is stuck paying off the initial sum. After the family pays for the apartment and health insurance, there are only pennies left over from his seemingly high salary.
Russian immigrants of the first generation want to have something of their own – not only to have something of their own and prove their success to others but also to leave some real estate to their children. But are they paying too high a price for this?
“We wanted to live in a just capitalist society, but we ended up in a corrupt brutal country, where only the poor and the millionaires have it easy,” complains Natasha, a friend of mine who works as a librarian. She has been working for about 10 years but her salary has practically not increased, unlike inflation. So what do these people have left to do? Head out to the protests.
“We see on American street signs images of the wealthy and satiated “fat cats of Wall Street” – copies of the bourgeois caricatures of the Satirical Rosta Posters of Mayakovsky,” writes New York based journalist Gennady Katsov in his blog for Echo Moskvy. “The ‘occupiers’ are acting on behalf of 99% of the population against the 1% superrich. Of course the best and simplest way to alleviate this situation is to take some more away from the 1% for the benefit of these 99%. Another country in back in th 20th century did just this. When they did away with the 1%, it turned out that the remain 99% wasn’t all that homogenous and carefree. Tens of millions of these 99% had to be destroyed, at which point they stopped and then returned to point of half-truths during the thaw, and eventually to the democratic principles of perestroika.”
Many successful Russians who emigrated in the 1970s and 1980s are trying to criticize the demonstrators, as they by habit adhere to Republic views. But their children have already become so Americanized that many are sitting out there on the sidewalks today with these slogans. Alongside the immigrants who came to the United States following the end of the economic boom, they have not had the opportunity to experience ‘ideal capitalize’. Usually they have enormous student loan debts, while work that they can find only allows them to pay them off gradually. There is no affluence or good life in sight.
My friend Ivan, a legal assistant, graduated from a prestigious university with an Art History degree, but he did not start a career in his educational field due to the miserly low salaries for museum workers, not to mention that such jobs are few and far between. But nonetheless he is stuck paying back student loans. He has signed several petitions on the forgiving of student loans, which the White House supports but no such law has been passed. Meanwhile, the total sum of student loans is expected to exceed $1 trillion in 2012. On the website www.wearethe99percent.tumblr.com you can find dozen of true-life stories about people who have finished college yet failed to find a high-paying job, thus become slaves to the banks.
Eat the Elite!
This wave of protests which began in the cultural and intellectual center of America – New York – has spread throughout the country and like a tsunami is gaining momentum. On the streets of such cities as Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston, an enormous number of students alongside people from ‘intelligent’ but relatively poorly compensated professions have taken to the streets under the ‘Occupy’ call to arms. Interestingly they have been joined by rather well insured and compensated union members – communications workers, teachers, municipal transit workers and nurses.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned the protesters that if the banks have problems, then the state will not have the funds to pay municipal workers. It appears that such admonitions are not having any effect on the demonstrators. The epicenter of the protests is New York City, where there are many who supported Obama and ridiculed George W. Bush, and where they all went out together to help the victims of the tragedy of September 11. These people were not only not frightened by police with truncheons and tear gas canister, such things only served to work them up.
The posters speak for themselves: “We are the 99%!!!”, “Banks got bailed out – we got sold out!!!”, “Eat the Elite” and “We Can Do Better than Capitalism”.
It is difficult to believe that the protests are happening own their own. The once was an orchestra without a conductor – the Persimfans – but it did not last long. Not only in music particularly in politics, spontaneous and self-regulating phenomena are simply unheard of. The leftist Occupy Wall Street movement is with increasing frequency being compared to the right-wing Tea Party Movement, which two years ago under Republican slogans demanded something similar. Then the conflict was squashed by the same corporations which the Occupy Wall Street movement is now railing against. On the surface we see that the movement is supported by celebrities – Yoko Ono, Mark Ruffalo and Penn Badgley, among others. The infamous documentary director Michael Moore, who gave a multitude of interviews to television channels, spoke before a large crowd of demonstrators in New York: “Each one of you here represents 100,000 Americans who couldn’t be here, and are happy you are.”
Apart from the public figures, some of the “big guns” have come out in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement: more than 50 organizations and unions throughout the country as well as major Democratic political leaders with enormous spheres of influence at the highest level. All of this is giving political observers reasons to believe that this ‘little American revolution’ could influence the presidential elections in 2012.
Anna Genova
