The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (56 page)

“There are more than three hundred people on this floor,” Kevin said. “Don’t you think
more than one guy ought to be short? Go ahead, here’s the prices—you can have five
million of everything you want up to a hundred million, I’ll sell you everything.”
The guy said he’d get back to him, but Kevin never heard a thing—so who was the pussy?

That month brought the second wobble. The Bear Stearns hedge fund got another margin
call, and this time the shit was so worthless that Bear had to step in and shut the
fund down. Instead of eating the loss, the bank decided to assume the financing, which
meant that Bear now had the virus and led directly to the third wobble, in March 2008,
when Bear went down and Kevin’s desk was one of the first to pull the wire.

Kevin spent the summer of 2008 traveling all the time, some for work, some for fun—Argentina,
China, Ukraine. In mid-September, he landed in a former Soviet republic at 4:00 a.m.,
turned on his BlackBerry, and saw on his Bloomberg application that Lehman had filed
for bankruptcy. Bear had just been a mortgage bucket shop; Lehman was a completely
different animal, a global player in derivatives, and Kevin’s bank had a ton of shit
with them. It took him twenty-four hours to get back to London, then on to New York,
where he had a good seat for the end of the world.

Within a few weeks he realized the scale of the destruction, the number of trades
that had to be unwound, and it was a fascinating time to wake up and go in to work.
It was the kind of seminal moment that few people got to experience. You found out
what people were really like. The rank-and-file guys in the trenches next to him pretty
much hung together, and his boss stayed loyal, but the ethical cream didn’t rise to
the top. Because of the bank’s exposure to Lehman, someone from senior management
came in one day looking for scapegoats and said, “Who the fuck did this?” Guys at
the top were shoving one another out of the way to get in a lifeboat, all the while
saying, “You’ll be fine. Stay right here and help that book out of its risk and we’ll
have you with a fresh start next year.” Kevin wasn’t fooled: “Dude, I can feel the
red dot on my forehead.” He was a rook and the game was all about what the queens
and kings decided. By the end of the year half the people in trading were gone, with
good severance pay, including Kevin.

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.