How did Occupy Wall Street suddenly become Occupy Los
Angeles? Occupy Cleveland? Occupy Janesville? Occupy
Pocatello? How did a sleep-in beneath the skyscrapers of
Lower Manhattan inspire kayakers clad as Robin Hood to
paddle up the Chicago River under a banner reading, Wall St. Takes From
the 99%. Gives to the Rich? And how did those
giant cutouts of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon end up
dancing with all those San Franciscans chanting, “Make
banks pay”? Despite what Republican presidential
candidate Herman Cain suggests, it was not some
“orchestrated” attempt to deflect blame from the flawed
policies of the Obama administration. It was not the
media looking for a “left-wing Tea Party.” And it
certainly was not a poll-tested, focus-grouped PR
campaign that billionaire-funded front groups employ to
gin up movements.
America is not broke. But it has broken
priorities. The Congressional
Progressive Caucus has the right fix:
save trillions, put Americans back to
work and protect Medicare, Medicaid and
Social Security. How? End the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, tax millionaires,
negotiate Medicare drug prices.
Occupy Wall Street started small, took a beating from
the cops and struggled for weeks to get the attention of
the political class, the media and even its own natural
allies. The only thing going for this unlikely
intervention has been the pitch-perfect resonance of its
founding premises. The American people understood Occupy
Wall Street, and began to embrace its promise, long
before the mandarins who presume to chart our national
discourse noticed that everything was changing. That’s
because the generators of this movement—and it is a
movement—have gotten three things right from the start:
The target is right. This has been a year of
agitation, from Wisconsin to Ohio to Washington. It has
seen some of the largest demonstrations in recent
American history in defense of labor rights, public
education, public services. But all those uprisings
attacked symptoms of the disease. Occupy Wall Street
named it. By aiming activism not at the government but
at the warren of bankers, CEOs and hedge-fund managers
to whom the government is beholden, Occupy Wall Street
went to the heart of the matter. And that captured the
imagination of Americans who knew Michael Moore was
right when he finished his 2009 documentary Capitalism:
A Love Story with an attempted citizen’s arrest
of the bankers who not only avoided accountability after
crashing the economy but profited from a taxpayer-funded
bailout. Like the populists, the socialists and the best
of the progressive reformers of a century ago, Occupy
Wall Street has not gotten distracted by electoral
politics; it has gone after the manipulator of both
major parties—what the radicals of old referred to as
“the money power.”
The numbers are right. If Thomas Frank’s What’s
the Matter With Kansas? taught us anything, it
was that the great accomplishment of the money power in
contemporary politics has been to divide the
overwhelming mass of Americans over social and cultural
issues, thus deflecting attention from fundamental
economic debates. The brilliance of Occupy Wall Street’s
message, “We are the 99 percent,” is that it invites
just about everyone who isn’t a billionaire to recognize
themselves as members of the class that has suffered
what Thomas Jefferson once described as “a long train of
abuses and usurpations.” For all the efforts of Wall
Street’s media and political defenders to dismiss the
persistent protesters as somehow un-American, the vast
majority of Americans recognize that kids in sleeping
bags did not shutter this country’s factories, mangle
our mortgage markets or create a pay-to-play system. The
99 percent did not ask for or approve a system that
always has money for wars and bank bailouts but won’t,
as former Congressman Alan Grayson notes, help the 24
million Americans who can’t find full-time work, the 50
million Americans who can’t see a doctor when they’re
sick, the 47 million Americans who need government aid
to feed themselves, the 15 million American families who
owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
The demands are right. The most comic
complaint about Occupy Wall Street—not just from critics
but even from some elite sympathizers—is that it lacks
well-defined demands. In fact, the objection of the
occupiers to a system of corporate domination and
growing inequality, and their desire to change that
system, makes a lot more sense to a lot more Americans
than anything being said by politicians. Polling
confirms this point: Barack Obama’s approval ratings are
dismal, but the approval ratings for the Republicans in
Congress are dramatically worse. The American people
desperately wanted this movement. That is proven not
only by the polls but by the practical embrace of the
Occupy Wall Street ethos in more than a thousand
communities across the nation. Some are already
occupying public spaces, others are marching and
rallying. Beyond Wall Street, there will be more
specific complaints, more adventurous alliances, more
practical politics, but there’s no reason why a
diversity of issues and tactics cannot build the
movement that was invited when the call to Occupy Wall
Street was issued.
The key word is “invited.” The genius of Occupy Wall
Street is that it is not a traditional political
project. It did not arrive with a set of talking points
and an organizing template. Its evolution has already
taken it far from where it began, physically or
politically. Its alliance with unions and other
progressive groups will in all likelihood transform the
movement as it spreads across the country, just as the
movement has the potential to transform its allies.
There will be ongoing occupations, but there’s also the
prospect of countrywide—indeed, worldwide—days of
action, like the one planned for October 29, in American
capital cities and cities around the world, the weekend
before the G-20 summit in France. The prospect of
massive demonstrations like the 1969 anti–Vietnam War
Moratorium, the immigrant rights demonstrations of 2006
and last winter’s mobilizations in and outside the
Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, has already unsettled
mainstream politicians and the pundit class that serves
as their stenographers. New York Congressman Peter King
told right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham, “It’s really
important for us not to be giving any legitimacy to
these people in the streets…. I’m old enough to remember
what happened in the 1960s, when the left wing takes to
the streets and somehow the media glorifies them, and it
ends up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.”
But it is happening. That’s exhilarating, and
necessary. Our political culture, as dysfunctional as it
is disappointing, will change only if those in power
feel threatened by movements that are impossible to
manage. Already, the reactions to the threat are
clarifying. The Republican Party, with rare exceptions,
has rallied to defend the banksters, with Representative
Paul Ryan fretting about “sowing class envy” and
Representative Eric Cantor warning that Americans might
become a “mob.”
Democrats have been more nuanced. President Obama says
he understands the frustration of the protesters, and
since advancing his jobs bill in September, he has moved
in a more populist direction. But he still promotes
free-trade deals that will exacerbate the unemployment
crisis, which fuels so much of the 99 percenters’
frustration. Other Democrats have been more consistent.
Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the
Congressional Black Caucus have been predictably warm in
their embrace of a populist movement that strengthens
their hand in party debates, and House minority leader
Nancy Pelosi has risen repeatedly to defend the
protesters, declaring, “I support the message to the
establishment, whether it’s Wall Street or the political
establishment and the rest, that change has to happen.
We cannot continue in a way that is not relevant to
their lives.”
Pelosi’s stance is commendable, yet it is an inadequate
counter to the nearly universal Republican demand for
more tax cuts, privatization, raging income inequality
and healthcare policies that tell the poor to die
quickly. The Democratic Party is anything but united on
behalf of a fair economy. In 2008, when everyone was
ready to end the Bush era, Obama could cobble together a
broad coalition to win the presidency. But that won’t
work now that the battle lines are drawn. “This is no
time to hang back,” says former Senator Russ Feingold.
“One of the biggest problems Democrats have is that they
forget the power and the passion that the base of the
party has.”
The president can no longer satisfy both the CEOs (some
of whom will see him as their best defense against the
rabble) and the single moms; if he tries, the single
moms will run out of patience. So it is that the Occupy
Wall Street movement might well develop into a virtual
primary challenge to Obama. Instead of coasting to
renomination, the president could find himself
confronted by protests from Iowa to New Hampshire to
Nevada to California—protests that would require him to
move to the left just as a credible primary challenger
might have done, protests that could make next year’s
Democratic convention in Charlotte more than just a
coronation.
Getting Obama to take the side of 99 percent of
Americans is smart politics for the Democrats. But that
ought not to be the goal of the Occupy Wall Street
movement. This fight is too important to be about one
politician, one party or one election. “Some people say
we are the Tea Party for the Democratic Party,” said
Emilio Baez, a 17-year-old high school student who
joined the Occupy Chicago protests. “That’s bullshit. We
are the working class for a mass movement of democracy.”
Baez is right. America needs a new politics, as much of
the streets as the polling place, a politics that, like
the labor movement of the 1930s, the civil rights and
antiwar movements of the 1960s, the environmental
movement of the early 1970s, forces both parties to
transform. Anything less is more of the same—more
poverty, more inequality, more economic injustice. And
if Occupy Wall Street is anything at all, it is a shout
from the 99 percenters: “We have had it!”
