The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (37 page)

Four or five people lifted Olsen and raced with him away from the police line. At the hospital, he was put into an induced coma to relieve brain swelling. He is now conscious but unable to speak. He communicates using a notepad.

I interviewed one of Olsen’s friends, Aaron Hinde, also an Iraq War veteran. He was at Occupy San Francisco when he started getting a series of frenzied tweets about a vet down in Oakland. Hinde raced to the hospital to see his friend. He later told me a little about him: “Scott came to San Francisco about three months ago from Wisconsin, where he actually participated in the holding of the State Capitol over there. Scott’s probably one of the warmest, kindest guys I know. He’s just one of those people who always has a smile on his face and never has anything negative to say. . . . And he believed in the Occupy movement, because it’s very obvious what’s happening in this country, especially to us veterans. We’ve had our eyes opened by serving and going to war overseas. So, there’s a small contingency of us out here, and we’re all very motivated and dedicated.”

As I was covering one of the Occupy Wall Street rallies in Times Square on October 15, I saw Sgt. Shamar Thomas become deeply upset. Police on horseback had moved in on protesters, only to be stopped by a horse that went down on its knees. Other officers had picked up metal barricades, squeezing the frightened crowd against steam pipes. Sgt. Thomas was wearing his desert camouflage, his chest covered with medals from his combat tour in Iraq. He shouted at the police, denouncing their violent treatment of the protesters. Thomas later wrote of the incident: “There is an obvious problem in the country and PEACEFUL PEOPLE should be allowed to PROTEST without Brutality. I was involved in a RIOT in Rutbah, Iraq 2004 and we did NOT treat the Iraqi citizens like they are treating the unarmed civilians in our OWN Country.”

A group calling itself Veterans of the 99 Percent has formed and, with the New York City Chapter of IVAW, set Wednesday as the day to march to Liberty Plaza to formally join and support the movement. Their announcement read: “‘Veterans of the 99 Percent’ hope to draw attention to the ways veterans have been impacted by the economic and social issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. They hope to help make veterans’ and service members’ participation in this movement more visible and deliberate.”

When I stopped by Occupy Louisville in Kentucky last weekend, the first two people I met there were veterans. One of them, Gary James Johnson, told me: “I served in Iraq for about a year and a half. I joined the military because I thought it was my obligation to help protect this country. . . . And right here, right now, this is another way I can help.”

Pundits predict the cold weather will crush the Occupy movement. Ask any veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq about surviving outdoors in extreme weather. And consider the sign at Liberty Plaza, held by yet another veteran: “2nd time I’ve fought for my country. 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”

November 16, 2011

The Brave New World of Occupy Wall Street

We got word just after 1 a.m. Tuesday that New York City police were raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment. I raced down with the
Democracy Now!
news team to Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square. Hundreds of riot police had already surrounded the area. As they ripped down the tents, city sanitation workers were throwing the protesters’ belongings into dump trucks. Beyond the barricades, back in the heart of the park, 200 to 300 people locked arms, refusing to cede the space they had occupied for almost two months. They were being handcuffed and arrested, one by one.

The few of us members of the press who managed to get through all the police lines were sent to a designated area across the street from Zuccotti Park. As our cameras started rolling, they placed two police buses in front of us, blocking our view. My colleagues and I managed to slip between them and into the park, climbing over the trashed mounds of tents, tarps, and sleeping bags. The police had almost succeeded in enforcing a complete media blackout of the destruction.

We saw a broken bookcase in one pile. Deeper in the park, I spotted a single book on the ground. It was marked “OWSL,” for Occupy Wall Street Library, also known as the People’s Library, one of the key institutions that had sprung up in the organic democracy of the movement. By the latest count, it had accumulated 5,000 donated books. The one I found, amidst the debris of democracy that was being hauled off to the dump, was
Brave New World Revisited
, by Aldous Huxley.

As the night progressed, the irony of finding Huxley’s book grew. He wrote it in 1958, almost thirty years after his famous dystopian novel,
Brave New World
. The original work described society in the future where people had been stratified into haves and have-nots. The
Brave New World
denizens were plied with pleasure, distraction, advertisement, and intoxicating drugs to lull them into complacency, a world of perfect consumerism, with lower classes doing all the work for an elite.

Brave New World Revisited
was Huxley’s nonfiction response to the speed with which he saw modern society careening to that bleak future. It seemed relevant, as the encampment, motivated in large part by the opposition to the supremacy of commerce and globalization, was being destroyed.

Huxley wrote in the book: “Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State—that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite.” Huxley goes on to write, “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.”

One of the People’s Library volunteers, Stephen Boyer, was there as the park was raided. After avoiding arrest and helping others with first aid, he wrote: “Everything we brought to the park is gone. The beautiful library is gone. Our collection of 5,000 books is gone. Our tent that was donated is gone. All the work we’ve put into making it is gone.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office later released a photo of a table with some books stacked on it, claiming the books had been preserved. As the People’s Library tweeted: “We’re glad to see some books are OK. Now, where are the rest of the books and our shelter and our boxes?” The shelter, by the way, was donated to the library by National Book Award–winner Patti Smith, the rock ’n’ roll legend.

Many other Occupy protest sites have been raided recently. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted to the BBC that she had been on a conference call with eighteen cities, discussing the situation. Another report noted that the FBI and Homeland Security have been advising the cities.

A New York state judge ruled late Tuesday that the eviction will stand, and that protesters cannot return to Zuccotti Park with sleeping bags or tents. After the ruling, a constitutional attorney sent me a text message: “Just remember: the movement is in the streets. Courts are always last resorts.” Or, as Patti Smith famously sings, “People Have the Power.”

November 23, 2011

Pulling Accounts from the Unaccountable

Less than a month after Occupy Wall Street began, a group was gathered in New York’s historical Washington Square Park, in the heart of Greenwich Village. This was a moment of critical growth for the movement, with increasing participation from the thousands of students attending the cluster of colleges and universities there. A decision was made to march on local branches of the too-big-to-fail banks, so participants could close their accounts, and others could hold “teach-ins” to discuss the problems created by these unaccountable institutions.

Heather Carpenter, according to the federal lawsuit filed this week in New York, is studying to be a certified nursing assistant, working to pay for school as a counselor for mentally disabled people at a group home on Long Island. Her fiancé, Julio Jose Jimenez-Artunduaga, is a Colombian immigrant, pursuing the American Dream and working part time as a bartender. They marched from Washington Square Park to a nearby Citibank branch, where she went to the teller to close her account, explaining her frustration with the bank’s new monthly $17 fee for accounts with balances below $6,000.

As described in the lawsuit, the teach-in began with participants “announcing the amount of their debt, discussing their student loan experience, and reciting sobering statistics related to the debt of college graduates.” The bank staff called the police, and Julio went outside to avoid any conflict. Heather closed her account and left as well. By that time, a large group of NYPD officers, including Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, as well as several plainclothes officers showed up. The police stormed into the bank, locked the doors, and began arresting those involved with the teach-in.

Even though Heather was outside, a plainclothes officer identified her as a protester and told her to get back in the bank. She said she was a customer and showed her receipt. To her shock, as documented by video, Heather was grabbed from behind by a plainclothes officer who began forcing her into the bank. She screamed, but within seconds disappeared into the vestibule, surrounded by a dozen cops, where she was roughly handcuffed and arrested. Julio was roughed up and arrested as well—all for closing an account at Citibank.

They spent over thirty hours in police custody and were charged with resisting arrest and criminal trespass. A month later, the New York District Attorney’s office indicated it would drop the charges at their court appearances. Heather and Julio still want to see Chief Esposito and the other arresting officers in court, though, for an explanation of the officers’ excessive force and unlawful arrest of the two.

Just weeks after their arrest, on November 5, thousands around the U.S. participated in Bank Transfer Day. Kristen Christian was upset with the announcement that Bank of America was going to charge a monthly $5 debit card fee. She created a Facebook event and shared it with her friends. Before long, Bank Transfer Day had 85,000 online supporters.

She reported that 40,000 new accounts were created at nonprofit credit unions across the country that day. She said that the $5 fee, which Bank of America has since scrapped, “illustrates how out of touch the executives of the large banks can be . . . with Bank of America, the fee only applied to account holders with less than $20,000 in combined accounts. I couldn’t support a business that would directly target the impoverished and working class.”

Just after the financial crash in late 2008, activists in Oregon started looking into the creation of a state bank, modeled after the only state-owned bank in the United States, in North Dakota. The cities of Portland and Seattle are now looking into shifting their massive municipal accounts away from the Wall Street banks. According to one report, Bank of America may lose upward of $185 billion from customers closing accounts.

In January 2010, the Move Your Money Project formed, encouraging individuals to shift their funds to local and nonprofit credit unions, to defund the Wall Street megabanks. Its organizers released a video based on the classic 1946 film of bank malfeasance,
It’s a Wonderful Life
, in which protagonist George Bailey fights to protect consumers from the greedy bank president, Mr. Potter. As Bailey exhorted in the film, “This town needs this measly one-horse institution, if only to have some place for people to come without crawling to Potter.” The Move Your Money video ends with this message: “If you leave your money with the big banks, they will use it to pay lobbyists to keep Congress from fixing the system . . . don’t just watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ . . . move your money.”

January 18, 2012

The SOPA Blackout Protest Makes History

January 18 marked the largest online protest in the history of the Internet. Websites from large to small “went dark” in protest of proposed legislation before the U.S. House and Senate that could profoundly change the Internet. The two bills, SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate, ostensibly aim to stop the piracy of copyrighted material over the Internet on websites based outside the United States. Critics—among them, the founders of Google, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Tumblr, and Twitter—counter that the laws will stifle innovation and investment, hallmarks of the free, open Internet. The Obama administration has offered muted criticism of the legislation, but, as many of his supporters have painfully learned, what President Barack Obama questions one day, he signs into law the next.

First, the basics. SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, while PIPA is the Protect IP Act. The two bills are very similar. SOPA would allow copyright holders to complain to the U.S. attorney general about a foreign website they allege is “committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations” of copyright law. This relates mostly to pirated movies and music. SOPA would allow the movie industry, through the courts and the U.S. attorney general, to send a slew of demands that Internet service providers (ISPs) and search engine companies shut down access to those alleged violators, and even to prevent linking to those sites, thus making them “unfindable.” It would also bar Internet advertising providers from making payments to websites accused of copyright violations.