He was glad to be out of the industry, and he took a very detached view of the whole thing. Who was responsible? It was hard to say with anything that big. On one level, he always thought that finance was bullshit. He hadn’t been doing God’s work—it was a job, and he never ascribed any value to it. At the same time, a good financial system was beneficial to a lot of people. It kept borrowing costs low, it meant you could carry a plastic card in your pocket instead of gold coins. Without the juice of Wall Street behind it, something like Silicon Valley couldn’t have exploded the way it did.
But when the private partnerships like Salomon started going public in the eighties, and boutique investment banks became huge trading houses, and dopey European banks like UBS got big into fixed income, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall erased the clear lines that had kept things in check, and the pay incentives were thrown out of whack, and the money got crazy—then people on Wall Street became greedy. Some of the worst were criminals, others were doing what they knew was just fucking wrong. Kevin didn’t know if the answer was reregulation or a moral housecleaning. It was ridiculous for a hedge fund manager like John Paulson to make $3.8 billion in one year just for pushing paper around, but how could you stop it? It was too late to restore Glass-Steagall and go back to the 1950s. The financial sector had gotten way too big—those minds on the Street should have been finding the green energy cure or starting the next tech boom. That was the country’s future, not banking.
Kevin spent a year traveling and seeing friends all over the world. He missed most of the recession at home, and anyway, New York came back pretty fast—there was a brief moment in the spring of 2009 when people wondered if they could still go out to restaurants. Wall Street came back, too, faster than anyone expected, and in 2010 Kevin got an offer from another European bank with a safe balance sheet. He hadn’t made enough in his first ten years to stay out of the game, so he went back in. On Wall Street the financial crisis felt like a speed bump.
* * *
Nelini Stamp heard that a Canadian magazine had called for some kind of action around Wall Street at noon on Saturday, September 17, 2011—it was all over Facebook, plus she knew one of the organizers—but by the time she went downtown people had already left the Charging Bull statue in Bowling Green because it had been cordoned off by police. The word was that everyone had gone a few blocks north up Broadway to a park under this big red thing. It was called Zuccotti Park—hardly anyone in New York knew it existed—right across Trinity Place from Ground Zero, where they were just finishing the 9/11 Memorial. Nelini got there in midafternoon and found about three hundred people, including a few of her friends, standing next to a giant sculpture of red steel beams rising like outstretched arms three stories into the sky. She walked around the park with her friends for a long time as the numbers grew. It was pretty cool. Her friend who’d helped plan it said, “We’re going to have a General Assembly,” and Nelini said, “Okay. I want to see that.”
The General Assembly started at seven on the granite steps down from the sidewalk along Broadway. Someone shouted “Mic check!” and other people shouted back “Mic check!”
“What does that mean?” Nelini asked.
“We’re going to use the people’s mic,” her friend said.
“What does that mean?”
Whatever the person speaking said, everyone around her repeated as loud as they could, a few words at a time, then again in two or three waves outward from the center, so that eventually everyone in the crowd could hear without using amplification, because they didn’t have a permit. Nelini thought that was cool, too. It brought everyone together in a way a normal microphone didn’t. There were no leaders, just facilitators who’d been trained in the technique of consensus. The GA wasn’t about issuing demands. People were in the park to express outrage at the banks and corporations and the power they had over people’s lives and democracy.
After the GA, they broke up into working groups and Nelini chose Outreach, because she was already thinking that they needed to get unions on board and she knew a lot of people in the labor movement. There were six or seven people in Outreach and they talked till almost midnight, and suddenly someone arrived with boxes of pizza. Everyone was madly tweeting and the word had gotten out to some local pizza place, which donated the pies. Nelini didn’t do Twitter, didn’t like the whole social networking thing because people acted like it was real life and it wasn’t. She was on Facebook because it was the only way to communicate with some of her friends. “What are you tweeting?” Nelini asked.
“Occupy Wall Street.”
She would have to get on Twitter. It was kind of crazy, the whole thing was crazy, but she decided not to go home that night. She didn’t want to give up the park, and she wanted to see what would happen in the morning. Zuccotti was privately managed, and the organizers had researched it and found out that Brookfield Properties had to keep the park open to the public twenty-four hours a day. That night about sixty people slept there. It was freezing cold for September. Nelini laid a piece of cardboard on the hard granite ground by the planters along Cedar Street and cuddled with her friends and tried to get some sleep before the first full day of the occupation.
She was twenty-three, a Brooklyn girl, two credits short of a high school diploma. Her mom was Puerto Rican and worked in customer service for Time Warner Cable; her dad came from Belize, had four kids by four women, and wasn’t part of her life. Nelini was short and hyper, with a wide mouth and caramel skin and hair that could be frizzy or straight, black or hennaed, depending on her mood. She liked to wear short skirts with tights, ankle boots, and sweaters over scoopneck tops. She smoked Camels and talked in a rapid run-on with a hoarse staccato laugh. At the beginning of 2011 she got a tattoo on her right forearm, the names of the five New York boroughs in Old Dutch, because she liked history, and also because she wanted to remember that things change.
When Nelini was a little girl, her mom came out as a lesbian, and Nelini’s grandparents stopped talking to her for a while. Nelini thought it was weird that people didn’t like gays as much as straights—her mom was her mom, and normal. Her mom’s partner worked at Smith Barney, and the day in 1998 when the merger of Travelers/Salomon Smith Barney and Citicorp was announced—the biggest corporate merger in American history—was also Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Nelini, age ten, and the other kids were ushered into a large room where a press conference was just letting out. The new logo of Citigroup, the largest financial services company in the world, was projected onto a screen with the red umbrella, and Sandy Weill was all smiles (he had talked to Clinton and knew that the Glass-Steagall Act, the only legal obstacle to the deal, would be repealed). Nelini didn’t know what a merger was, but at school the next day she had the jump on her friends: “Did you guys hear about Citigroup?”
Her mom’s partner lost her job right before 9/11, and then they broke up, and Nelini and her mom ended up in a rental on Staten Island surrounded by Irish and Italian families. Nelini loved music, theater, and dance. As a kid she had a manager, acted in a couple of movies, and played cello on Divas Live 98 on VH1—then things got tight and she had to drop her private classes. The whole performing world was full of stress. You had to have the right body, the right hair, and make it big by your twenties, and what was success anyway? Signing with a major record label and putting out crappy music? But the other half of her personality, the realistic half, was drawn to stories of workers and struggle. At school she loved reading about the Great Depression and FDR—it all seemed so real. She liked looking at the iconic picture of workers eating lunch on the steel beam at Rockefeller Center way up over Manhattan, and she plowed through a huge biography of the labor martyr Joe Hill. She always thought her mom belonged to a union, and when she finally learned that that wasn’t the case, she was crushed.
Ever since fifth grade Nelini had wanted to attend LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts, but in her senior year there she stopped being excited about her future. She had
self-esteem issues and became depressed. The school was too big, and the educational system didn’t care about her, so she stopped going to classes, and when the high school wouldn’t let her walk at graduation because she still needed to attend summer school, she said “Aw, fuck it” and didn’t bother with her diploma, which made her mother really mad. Nelini felt bad about being another person-of-color dropout, but the school only wanted her as a statistic for graduation rates. She spent the next year at home reading, and money was so tight that at one point Nelini answered the door and was served an eviction notice by a marshal.
She had to get a job, and she found one with the Working Families Party, a political organization with ties to the unions. They had cramped, cluttered offices in downtown Brooklyn. Nelini made thirty thousand a year canvassing door-to-door for progressive candidates in local elections and issues like campaign finance reform and paid sick days. She turned out to be a star canvasser. She could find the humanity in people even when they were closing the door in her face, and she didn’t get discouraged. She hadn’t given up on music and the arts, but she also wanted to organize, get down and dirty, be in the fight.
She was twenty when Obama emerged in the 2008 campaign. She thought it would be awesome to have a black man as president, but she wondered if he’d turn out to be as progressive as Hillary—he knew how to play to both sides. Then, suddenly, it began to feel like a popular movement was rising, for things like single-payer health care, and if Obama was the reason for that movement, she was going to be for him. When the Wall Street crisis hit right before the election, she thought, “This is it, the financial system is coming to an end.” She expected a return to the fifties and sixties, harsh regulations and a blue-collar economy, but without the bigotry (because the American dream in those days didn’t make room for people like her and her mother). Then Obama got into office and it didn’t happen. Instead, the banks were back in business, the corporations and the rich made more and more money while the rest of the country suffered. Nelini moved into a tiny bedroom in a group house with other activists in Bed-Stuy, two blocks from the Marcy Houses. Running campaigns for Working Families through the recession, she began to think that the democratic system was set up to protect capital, with lobbyists and everything else, and the only way anything was going to change would be by getting rid of capitalism.
But the struggle took so long, full of little battles that kept being refought, most of the time on the defensive, trying to get a Yonkers city councilman reelected or prevent cuts to the New York City budget. There was so much cynicism, and all the complaining about injustice that went on in all the living rooms and bars never sparked the bone-dry wood—until that Saturday just after the tenth anniversary of 9/11, when a small group of people lit a fire one block east of the site.
* * *
For two weeks Nelini woke up in the sleeping bag she’d brought to the park, rode the subway to work, hurried back downtown on her lunch break with stacks of flyers she’d copied at the office, returned to work, went home to Bed-Stuy for a shower and change of clothes, got back to the park for the evening GA, where other occupiers would tell her, “You look nice,” and then spent another night sleeping outside. So much was happening and she was moving so fast that people who became her best friends in the movement later told her she’d been too crazed and distracted in those early days to hold a conversation.
Within a week there were two thousand people in Zuccotti Park. The occupiers renamed it Liberty Square, after Tahrir Square in Cairo. That second Saturday, they marched up Broadway to Union Square chanting “All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street!” and “We—are—the ninety-nine percent!” Nelini danced and jumped and led the chants, a dervish running on an emotional surge, and then things turned crazy, with marchers blocking traffic and cops making scores of arrests, and she had never seen anything like it before, friends of hers being hauled away, and suddenly she started crying. A white-shirted officer squirted four women in the face with pepper spray, and when Nelini and some others realized that the video was going viral over YouTube while they were still marching, they rushed back to the park and held a quick press conference. “We’re here to be nonviolent,” she told the assembled cameras, and that night her mom happened to watch it on New York 1 and called her.
“I saw you down there—what are you doing?”
“I’ve been here for a week, Mom.”
The park, the video, and the brand fused and suddenly the media became obsessed with Occupy Wall Street, the name was all over the blogs and tweets. Singers, actors, and scholars started showing up at Zuccotti, and even though no one knew exactly what it was all about—since Occupy was proceeding along the “horizontal” lines of anarchist practice, and there were no demands, no structures, no leaders—visitors to the park couldn’t miss the electricity in the air, the sense that something widely felt but long buried or dispersed had exploded spontaneously into the world and come together in this chaotic, thousand-headed form.
Nelini’s boss at work, Bill, knew she was involved, and one day he asked her, “You’ve been down at Occupy, right? What is it?”
She told him: it was the coolest thing, it was a movement, it was really happening, more and more people were getting involved, all kinds of different people, not just activists.
“The unions want to do a march in solidarity,” Bill said—but they were also wary of Occupy, of what it was or could turn into. “Is it okay to do that?”
Nelini agreed to help organize a solidarity march to Foley Square with thousands of union members and students. She became a liaison between the occupation and the outside groups. The word “leader” was pretty much banned, but she was becoming one. Her boss decided to let her work at Occupy full-time, and even after she stopped sleeping at the park she only got two or three hours a night at home, she was so frantic with adrenaline and a million things to do. Her visibility brought her to the attention of some right-wing websites, and they brandished Nelini’s affiliation with the Working Families Party as proof that the whole thing was being secretly controlled by ACORN, the defunct community organization, which had helped to found the party.
Late on the night of Sunday, October 2, the day after she’d been arrested, along with seven hundred others, on the Brooklyn Bridge, Nelini got a call from Max, her new friend at Occupy. There was a conference in Washington first thing Monday morning, organized by the activist Van Jones’s group Rebuild the Dream, a left-wing answer to the Tea Party. Max worked for the group, and Jones had asked him to pick someone from Occupy to come down and speak, but the original choice turned out to believe in global conspiracies and lizardmen, so he had to be dropped at the last minute. Could Nelini get on a train to D.C.? She reached Penn Station at 4:30 a.m., but her credit card didn’t work, so she called Max, who was broke and woke up his boss at Rebuild the Dream, who bought Nelini a plane ticket since the train was going to get in too late. In Washington she ran from her cab into the conference and was out of breath when she took the stage and started speaking.
“I went down there and didn’t realize it was going to change my life,” she said, straining to reach the lectern microphone and put the unbelievable excitement of the past two and a half weeks into words. “I started sleeping on cardboard and pressuring labor and community organizations to come on down and check it out … A lot of people have asked about demands. We don’t need demands. If we demand something from Wall Street, we’re telling them that they have the power. And we have the power because we have strength in numbers.”
Nelini had begun to think that Occupy Wall Street was the start of a revolution.
* * *
The park was a small rectangular block paved in granite, with fifty-five honey locust trees, in the shadow of skyscrapers. On the west end, facing the huge construction site at Ground Zero, a drum circle rolled out its wild, interminable beat, adrenaline for the occupiers and annoyance for the neighbors. The drummers’ area was called “the ghetto,” made up of hard-core an
archists and long-term homeless people, a world unto itself, where interlopers were made to feel unwelcome. Tents were forbidden by the police, so the overnight occupiers lay down on tarps over the unforgiving granite. The center of the park was crowded with various hubs dedicated to the occupation’s self-organization: the kitchen tarp, where food prepared on the outside was served to anyone who lined up; the comfort station, where occupiers could obtain donated wet wipes, toiletries, and articles of clothing; the recycling site, where people composted food waste and took turns pedaling a stationary bike to generate battery power; the library, which grew to several thousand volumes stacked high on tables; the open-air studio, where computers and cameras streamed live footage of the occupation twenty-four hours a day.
On the east end, along the wide sidewalk next to Broadway, beneath the red steel sculpture called Joie de Vivre, the occupation and the public merged. Demonstrators stood in a row, displaying signs as if hawking wares, while workers on their lunch hour and tourists and passersby stopped to look, take pictures, talk, argue. An elderly woman sat in a chair and read aloud from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Another woman stood silently while holding up a copy of Confidence Men, a book about the Obama presidency—day after day. An old man in a sport coat and golf cap held a sign: FOR: REGULATED CAPITALISM. AGAINST: OBSCENE INEQUALITY. NEEDED: MASSIVE JOBS PROGRAM. A union electrician in a hard hat: OCCUPY WALL STREET. DO IT FOR YOUR KIDS. A woman in a blue nurse’s smock: THIS RN IS SICKENED BY WALL STREET GREED. TRUST HAS BEEN BROKEN. A young woman in jeans: WHERE DID MY FUTURE GO? GREED TOOK IT. There was WE’RE HERE. WE’RE UNCLEAR. GET USED TO IT, and also SOMETHING IS WRONG.
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