Occupy Wall Street Dispatches: Day 1

Death and Taxes’ coverage of Occupy Wall Street.

One must walk through an ocean of tourists congregating around the 9/11 memorial site, heads craned up into the atmosphere, slack-jawed, staring at Freedom Tour the WTC ashes to get to the occupation. Police are everywhere. Stationed at the construction site, the Federal Reserve and now the Occupy Wall Street zone.

Everything is orderly. Various assemblies have sprouted up. Socialists are recruiting. Individuals are filming, interviewing and recording audio, others are handing out fliers. Veteran sympathesizers are out to offer their support. An old, grizzled man wearing spectacles and carrying a red flag stomps around the grounds crying, “This is all the Left can do—talk! We have a golden opportunity here to act.” Too crazy or perhaps too right to be an agent provocateur. If he’s an agent and trying to incite the crowd, the man is in deep, deep cover—so far down the rabbit hole that he won’t be finding his way out anytime soon.

A gaggle of gutter punks, bohemians, face-painted hipsters and ’60s hippies hoping to revive the dream or maybe to see just how far it has faded. The police have formed a perimeter and were perfectly reserved and non-combative. Very strange, indeed.

Various individuals donning Anonymous masks, both on and off, stalk the grounds. One even spoke, though he seemed not to be offering ideas but ranting at someone in one of the assemblies.

My first impression of the occupation as a whole was that of, “Hey, quite a lot of white college and post-college students sitting about,” pontificating on the usual matters, most especially corporate personhood. An important issue, no doubt; but apart from that storyline, ideas are short here. At least half of what is being said is a regurgitation.

The overwhelming impression is of echoes upon echoes of what is wrong, but few prescriptions for what to do about it—very few constructive ideas. One young man suggested the first step should be to take the issue of corporate personhood all the way up to the Supreme Court, but failed to state how this might be accomplished.

Others are clearly more intelligent and have thought a great deal about how a future world might be molded out of the crumbling present. But most protesters hardly represent the various strata of American citizenry. This anti-Wall Street, crony capitalist sentiment needs to bring a more a complete representative cross-section to bear on culture: scientists, businessman, workers and various others from the middle and lower classes who’ve been blanked out of existence—not just the counterculture.

Despite these criticisms, there were more promising moments.

For instance, one activist, using a megaphone, spoke about how there is more than enough food and housing to feed and shelter everyone in this country. He, of course, was not the one railing ad infinitum about corporate personhood. Another individual suggested that when Occupy Wall Street had run its course, everyone in attendance should return to their communities to implement new ideas in a constructive way.

These individuals were idea men, creative thinkers; and this is what the occupation needs.

If everyone had come with one constructive, workable and achievable idea, there would be a sense of momentum. As it stands, the momentum is rather minimal or tentative. People are excited and unsure about what to do or where things will go with the occupation, but this is to be expected.

As one protester noted, “A lot of us don’t know where to go, but this is just the stepping stone—this is just the beginning. This is why we need to have the discussions.”

But it was his next thought that was the most practically useful—a thought that I have championed here at Death and Taxes quite often: that banks only have power because we give them our money. We should instead turn to credit unions for our banking needs. The protester expressed a similar sentiment in saying, “Our actions do count, especially at a local level. A lot of these financial organizations do depend on our money in their systems to grow. So, say for instance we had a mass exodus away from a lot of the big banks, then that’s all it’s going to take to bring them down.”

Ambitious? Yes, but that’s no reason not to convince at least a few people per day that they should bank with a credit union instead of with Chase, Bank of America or Wells Fargo. (Read my article “5 Reasons to Put Your Money in a Credit Union” to better understand the advantages of credit unions versus big banks.)

A protester named Ketchup, who flew in from Chicago, decked out in a nice yellow dress with red spectacles, had a rather commanding voice but only offered her support of those comments that came before hers. One had the impression that she might have had other ideas to express but she, like many others, was adjusting to the idea of a spontaneous assembly—the idea that no one should dictate but operate democratically.

We shall see where it goes.

Stay tuned for more updates on Occupy Wall Street.