By John Gapper
It is time for Occupy Wall Street, and its derivatives around the US and the world, to learn a lesson from the name of the left-wing campaign group formed in 1998 in response to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Move On. They have better things to do than fight for the inalienable right to a sleepover.
Whether or not it was exactly the most suitable moment for the park to be cleared of tents and tarpaulins and for the occupants to find beds of their own, it would have to have happened sooner or later, winter notwithstanding. Mr Bloomberg struck a good balance by insisting they could protest there, but not treat it as a home.
I sympathised with Occupy Wall Street when I first visited the protesters six weeks ago, and still do. Although some of their ideas are misguided, there is a reason why they have gathered support from millions of people. Who does not feel there is something wrong with government-backed banks acquiring such a disproportionate share of society’s wealth?
It was clever not to get dragged into politics as usual but instead to come up with new ideas using an idealistic form of direct democracy. The fact that they were committed enough to roll up and take part in long, peaceful, consensus-building debates was salutary.
But the longer the camps endure, the more they try the patience, not only of the police and politicians, but of neighbours and other people who started out by agreeing with them. As Adbusters, the Canadian group which sparked the protests, said this week in its 18th Tactical Briefing: “Hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant non-violence losing its allure.”
A fringe of the dispossessed and alienated has been drawn to the protest and the mood at Zuccotti Park was febrile this week – protesters shouting angrily at police and being roughly arrested. Mr Bloomberg exaggerated the health and safety risks – one is in more danger walking across Broadway to the park’s east than standing in it – but two months is enough.
On the face of it, he has little credibility in squaring up to Occupy Wall Street, given that the industry pays a lot of taxes to the city, and selling financial data to the Street has made him the 30th wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine. This not only places him in the 1 per cent, but among the one in 230m.
The mayor, however, generally administers the city in a centrist and technocratic – albeit tactless – way. Despite protesters’ claims that their civil liberties were being infringed, he was unambiguously correct in his assertion: “The First Amendment [to the US constitution] protects speech – it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.”
This point of law was settled by the Supreme Court in 1984 when a campaign group called Community for Creative Non-Violence tried to sleep out in tents in Lafayette Park, near the White House, to draw attention to the plight of the homeless. “Lafayette Park and others like it are for all the people and their rights are not to be trespassed [on] even by those who have some ‘statement’ to make,” Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled impatiently.
Some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters concede this fact. Jeffrey Marx (“like the comedians, not the communist”), to whom I spoke as we walked around the police-barricaded park on Tuesday, said ruefully that Mr Bloomberg was “bound to do it at some point, and he was very good at crafting the verbiage ... It’s just a physical thing, a little bump in the road. It won’t ruin things.”
Even before the police raid, some of the campaign’s organisers had been looking for a floor in a nearby building to shelter for the winter. The intellectual action has already been moving out of the park and into working groups that discuss everything from alternative banking to green economics.
The alternative banking group defies the traditional image of Occupy Wall Street. Many of its most committed participants come from the finance industry, including some bankers and traders from large Wall Street firms. It has been organised by Carne Ross, a diplomat and author of The Leaderless Revolution, and Cathy O’Neil, a quantitative financial analyst who has worked at D.E. Shaw, the hedge fund, and RiskMetrics, the consultancy.
The group is drafting comments on implementation of the Volcker Rule limiting proprietary trading in large banks, and trying to invent a structure for a new kind of mutual bank. It could draw on credit unions and mutual organisations such as Mondragon, the Basque federation of worker co-operatives.
“I worked in the financial industry and spent years doing something that I slowly but surely realised was a house of cards,” Ms O’Neil told me. “You observe the incentives at first hand and see how corrupt it is.” She admits it is “a little bit bizarre” to find insiders planning Wall Street’s overthrow but they are “the only ones who understand it”.
If Occupy Wall Street is to leave a permanent mark, this is the sort of effort on which it must focus, rather than seizing patches of land. The brokers who met at a Buttonwood tree on Wall Street in 1792 to found the New York Stock Exchange created something enduring. They did not need to sleep under it.
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