Air Date: 9-18-2026

Today we're doing something new and different but also very old. Occupy Wall Street just hit its 15th anniversary this month and we thought we'd do something that only we can, which is dip into our archives and pull out the best of the Occupy coverage we played in real time as it was happening as well as some other retrospective coverage that aired 10 years later.

Full Show Notes

 

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we're doing something new and different but also very old. Occupy Wall Street just hit its 15th anniversary this month and we thought we'd do something that only we can, which is dip into our archives and pull out the best of the Occupy coverage we played in real time as it was happening as well as some other retrospective coverage that aired 10 years later.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 60 minutes today include

Countdown with Keith Olberman

The Library Of Electronic Press

On the Media

Planet Money

The Rachel Maddow Show

The David Pakman Show

and The Dig

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, THE STATE STRIKES BACK

Section B, RIGGED SYSTEM, RIGGED COVERAGE

Section C, WHAT THE MOVEMENT WAS DOING

And Section D, THE LEGACY, 10 YEARS ON

And now, on to the show.

And Jolly Mullaney, a reporter of the New York Daily News, has tweeted at this hour that police are indeed pepper spraying and arresting Occupy Wall Street protesters on Wall Street. additionally, I can see protesters in kettled area on Wall and Broadway doing jazz hands in air. additionally, we had told you earlier from Ryan Devereaux of Democracy Now!,

who was on the program earlier in the week, that he reports from Broadway and Wall Street, protesters attempted to enter the Wall Street area after the, basically 12-block march, from Foley Square back to Zuccotti Park via City Hall, that police pushed back, fights ensued, random pepper spraying into that crowd that tried to occupy Wall Street, literally to get onto Wall Street.

police on horseback came out. More police showed up. Arrests were made, and Ryan Devereaux said he personally saw at least 20 people arrested. Obviously, nothing close to the 700 at Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday, but, barricades were knocked down. And so after an extraordinarily peaceful and accomplish-filled day for the Occupy Wall Street protesters, as night falls in New York, it's an entirely different scene, and we're gonna continue to provide you with details as they come into us here at the, control desk.

For the whole of the time that the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been making their case for a sea change in the way we Americans permit big business to draw and quarter and circumscribe our lives, media, too corrupt or too dense to understand anything more complicated than whether the blonde is missing or the verdict is guilty, have parroted, "What do they want?

What is their catchphrase?" In our third story, it is not a catchphrase, but it is a declaration of what they want, that the document which I will read in full in a moment is not a list of laws to be repealed, nor politicians to be elected, may only confuse the precocious ninth graders now passing for TV anchor newsmen these days, but the absence of the kind of painted footsteps with which they used to mark the floors of dance instruction studios is, in a way, breathtaking.

The two-by-four that Errol Louis described. It implies that there is so much to change, that such a tipping point has been reached, that some easy-to-apply Band-Aids just are not going to be enough. And it implies that the commentators and politicians and moneyed interests that do not come to understand the scope of what must change will be without influence and without power before they realize that the change has happened.

So with that as preamble, here is, formally and finally, what Occupy Wall Street says and wants. It is, in essence, their special comment. As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members, that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights and those of their neighbors, that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth, and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.

We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity and continue to give executives exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in workplaces based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals and actively hide these practices. They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions. They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and use that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay. They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people with none of the culpability or responsibility. They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity. They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products, endangering lives in pursuit of profit. They determine economic policy despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians who are responsible for regulating them. They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil. They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit. They purposefully kept people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media. They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners, even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas. They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. To the people of the world, we, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power, exercise your right to peaceably assemble, occupy public space, create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal. Join us and make your voices heard. The statement issued from Zuccotti Park by the General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street. We'll continue, and we'll continue to update you on the events and the violence that ensued this evening.

We are the 99%. It's the rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. They say that a tiny minority controls America's wealth. So how rich have the richest got? And how poor are the rest of us? Is it really 99% versus 1%? The richest 1% of the US population, they own a third of US net worth. So how did we get here?

When times were good, everyone gained. In Bill Clinton's boom of 1993 to 2000, average incomes went up just as they did during George W. Bush's boom at the beginning of his presidency. But if you were rich, you gained even more. That's nearly half of all the growth in the Clinton boom years. Under George W.

Bush, it was even more. And there are some really rich people in the US today. In fact, there are now over 3.1 million millionaires. But these are not the richest of all. The US has over 400 billionaires, more than any other country in the world. Who's at the top of that pile? These three have a combined net worth of $131 billion.

That's just over the combined budget shortfall of every state in the US for 2011, more than the cost of the global war on terror in 2010. But haven't the rich lost out as well as the poor in the economic crash? When the economy tanked, everyone suffered. In 2010, the average American earned $26,487, down over $2,000 in real terms on 2006.

If you were poor, it's been an even bigger drop. The 24 million least wealthy households in America saw their average income go down by 10%. If you were super rich, it went down, too. The 400 wealthiest American households lost around 4%, including inflation. That's down to an average of $270.5 million per household.

So the richest lost 4%. The poorest lost 10%. Part of the reason average Americans have been hit so hard is where their wealth comes from. Before the crash, middle-class Americans had 65% of their wealth tied up in their house. But the richest 1% of the population kept most of their wealth in stocks and shares and business.

So when house prices went south, many Americans found their wealth disappearing, too. Now, one in every seven Americans lives below the poverty line. That's a record 46.2 million people. One in six Americans have no health insurance. That's 50 million people.

14.5% of American households are defined as food insecure. That means for every seven households, one will have trouble putting enough food on the table. But some things are doing very well. Sales of luxury cars are up. Big luxury brands have reported their best sales figures in years. Tiffany jewelers up.

Brands like Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, brands like Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Porsche. And America's top executives are paying themselves very well, too. It is down, but still pretty good. 4.9 million dollars each in the latest figures, and a Washington Post investigation found the following: Since the 1970s, median pay for executives at the nation's largest companies has more than quadrupled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to researchers.

Over the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker has dropped more than 10%. But don't the super-rich pay taxes? They do, just not quite so much as the rest of us. If you earn between $100,000 and $200,000, you will be paying up to 25% effective tax rate, and that's before payroll taxes kick in. The 400 richest tax returns surveyed by the IRS paid just 18.1% in 2008, and it's got better for them.

In 2001, as George W. Bush became president, that rate was 23%. So is it 99% versus 1%? The richest 1% of the US population own a third of US net worth. But an even smaller group, the 0.01% of the population, are at a record high. In fact, is it really 99.99% versus 0.01%? So where do you fit? Are you one of the 99.99% or one of the 0.01%?

Interestingly, the world watches the protest called Occupy Wall Street, now finishing its third week camping out in Lower Manhattan. Recent clashes in which police pepper sprayed and beat protestors with batons drew even the most resistant media outlets. 

Each new depiction of the abuses of the police on the First Amendment, the more waves of occupation will spread across this country.

Yeah. And you should be proud of that, police- ... because you are participating in our media 

publicity campaign. Some Occupy Wall Street advocates complained about what they called a news blackout in its early weeks, but in fact, this progressive populist protest did better than its anti-government analog, the Tea Party.

According to the Pew Research Center, the Wall Street protests made up 1.6% of the overall news hole in the week of September 26th to October 2nd. The first Tea Party protests in February 2009 received no measurable coverage. True, much of the Occupy Wall Street coverage has been dismissive or worse, but the Tea Party condemned its coverage too.

Soon, of course, the Tea Party scored pots of conservative money and a house organ in Fox News. For now, Occupy Wall Street, which calls for economic justice for the vulnerable but offers no specifics, no demands and no candidates, is on its own. Why did 

he do that? 

Thursday was sunny and fine, and Foley Square was full of people, many looking like they'd slept there, which they had.

There was food, lots of cameras, the curious and the committed, the latter with signs condemning the 1% of Americans whose grip on wealth and power makes life so hard for the other 99%. The mood was good. Bill Dobbs was sitting at a tiny table with a handwritten sign saying, "Press," so people like me would have someone to talk to.

He had worked with the AIDS activist group ACT UP years ago. 

We're down here giving off a loud outcry in the shadow of Wall Street. It has now sparked other similar protests in other cities around the country. That's very important. 

How does it translate into action, something more than just a kind of pretty decor without any focus?

It's a 

very clear focus when you say Occupy Wall Street 

You think? 

Let me put it in this way. Easily 150, 200 or more outlets have sent staff down here to do stories, sometimes freelancers. When I look online at the leads, they've framed the issue, often revolving around economics, and I think there's a problem in people hammering and demanding that there be a slogan or a list of things that people want because it's a huge project just to get attention, and that's happened.

Wall Street's not going to get reformed overnight, nor is Congress, but there's anger and despair that's brought people down here. There's also camaraderie, community, and fun, and those are the two ingredients that have enabled this protest to sustain itself against the NYPD and the weather for almost three weeks now.

You wouldn't be down here if there wasn't some buzz around this. 

There are a number of people who say the attention really riveted on this place when the cops pepper sprayed people, corralled people, and so on, and then suddenly people were noticing what was going on in Wall Street in a way that they had not before.

Part of this protest is media production. Dozens of people out with video cameras coordinating that, uploading it, live streaming. That's how the police misconduct came to light. So we have one working group that's dealing extensively with creating media to project what people are doing here, and some of us are working with media outlets to get the message through.

There have been columns and there have been editorials which have said you might not agree with the way that people on this plaza are crying out, but the issues that are being raised could not be more important. It's, it's been a slow build. 

What's next? Do you have a plan? 

right now the, the plan is to be here indefinitely and to do everything possible to bring more people into it.

People come in all the time. They want to know what's going on. There was a sign one day on the plaza that said, "If you make less than $250,000, you should join us." Why? Because everybody's hanging by a thread, and that's also true of members of the media. You know, recall a broadcast producer coming through here who's very grumpy, and he said, "I'm really mad because I wanted to cover something else and my boss assigned me to cover self-indulgent college students."

I said, "If I may, how's your pension?" He said, "I don't have one." I said, "You know, that's part of the reason people are here." 

Some protests fizzle, some become movements, the result of an unpredictable alchemy of character, issue, tactics, and timing. Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University and is the author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.

Does he see movement potential in Occupy Wall Street? 

For it to become a movement, it has to become organized. It has to have recognizable spokespeople. It has to have a strategy and not just a set of protest tactics. So this may or may not become one, but right now it is, a protest campaign. 

It's often been likened to the Tea Party, which was often mischaracterized as being purely AstroTurf, the, child of a lot of well-heeled conservative activists.

I mean, it was that, but it wasn't only that. 

No, I think the Tea Party was and is, quite sincere, grassroots insurgency. It's really the creature of, 30, 40 years of conservative organizing on these issues. The rage of the Tea Party bubbled up partly because of the, financial crisis, the idea that big banks were being, bailed out by the government, and also a frustration with their own conservative president, George W.

Bush. 

So what do you think Occupy Wall Street needs in order to become a movement? 

It needs to last longer , of course. Get alliances, not just with some labor unions, but with perhaps immigrant groups, perhaps with some people in left-wing Democratic Party. It needs to do what the civil rights movement did, what the, anti-war movement did in the 1960s, what the labor movement did in the 1930s, which is to appear to be the voice of people who have not really had a voice about their discontent, their anger with what's happened to, the American economy.

What we're seeing, I think, between Tea Party people and the Wall Street protesters, is a battle to define who's to blame for our economic calamity. Who's to blame for the lack of jobs? Who's to blame for the political system not really responding? 

I think that the Occupy Wall Street protest has undergone a transition of some kind in the last week, that somehow it's crossed over into being taken seriously.

Oh, I think you're right. I think you're right. 

Why is that? It's almost conventional wisdom they can't go anywhere without goals. They can't go anywhere without organization. They can't go anywhere without clear demands and party affiliations. They actively resist these things. They want to move ahead in a inchoate fashion as a, an expression of discontent.

Well, I think at this stage, being a little inchoate, being a little incoherent even, but being very clear what you're against more than what you're for, enables lots of people to take part with their own reasons. But after a while, when we're getting into November and December in the, in the Northeast, clearly people aren't gonna continue to camp out in large numbers.

So at this stage, what they're doing is very effective. If it continues to go on, people in the media will say, "Well, you did this for, two months. What are you gonna do next?" 

But I'm still puzzled. Why are they even effective now? 

Well, partly, talk about the media, I think there's been a sense that with this economic, discontent, not just here, but elsewhere in the world, it's that why aren't Americans angry about this?

Why are the only Americans angry, angry about the government? So I think for very good reasons, a lot of people in the media have been looking for this to happen for some time, and once it starts to happen, they cover it, and the coverage itself helps to generate more interest. 

The, Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters kicked this whole thing off with a call to occupy Wall Street last summer.

Its co-founder told Salon that AdBusters was a student of the Situationist movement. This is the idea that if you have a very powerful meme, an idea, and the moment is ripe, then that is, in itself, enough to ignite a revolution. 

Well, the Situationists did not ignite a revolution. They did ignite a very powerful movement that was pretty short-lived in France and, a few other countries, and they were influential to a certain degree among some new left intellectuals in this country as well.

The fact that most people in your listening audience have never heard of them itself, I think, is a, ... is indication that their influence was, interesting, but not highly significant, I don't think. One thing they did make clear, and this was certainly happening in the '60s with people like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Yippies, is that they realized that if you can be humorous and, provocative and make the powers that be look small, look ridiculous, you can really get people on your side.

I guess I subscribe, to my own surprise, to a kind of ether theory of movements in that, you know, in the Tea Party, you had all of this anger going into the ether. It didn't really matter whether the facts were right or wrong. There was a kind of change in the temperature, and suddenly these ideas were everywhere just filling the air.

It strikes me that this is an attempt to change the temperature again, to change how people see the world. 

A- as a historian, I think that nothing comes from nothing, and it's still in numbers fairly small, that has to be said. But then, of course, the four people who sat in at lunch counters in, Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960 was also a small group, but they were representing a larger group.

So size itself isn't enough. But I think, people in the media are groping to sort of understand who these people are, whether they are really on the left or whether they are just a group of fairly non-ideological people. All these questions seem to be open. 

Do you have any notion of which way you think this could go?

This is the fun about being a historian. You know, these, these things are not predictable. They really have to keep adapting to changes in the structures that they are protesting. People make their own history, but not as they please, as this, famous leftist Karl Marx wrote in the 19th century. 

Michael, thank you very much.

Oh, you're very welcome. 

Michael Kazin's new book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.

Surely you've heard by now about the hundreds of people living and protesting in Zuccotti Park. It's a plaza near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, and they've been there for the last couple weeks. 

Here in New York, it's just all-consuming. It's all over the media. You know, we see these protesters walking around, and the protests seem to be getting bigger and bigger.

This week, a lot of labor unions joined in. Congress people have been coming out in support of the protesters. My dad called me today to ask if he should go, and- 

My brother's flying in from Seattle to go to Wall Street and join the protesters. So but, but you and I, Adam, we're Planet Money, and we cover a lot of what takes place on Wall Street.

So we wanted to find out what exactly are these Wall Street protesters against, so we went to the park. The park is crowded. It's a little dirty. It's, it's not that big a square. It's just one block long, and the crowd skews mostly young and bearded, army jacketed and sweat shirted. And there are a myriad of signs against lobbyists, against banks, against the war.

And it was like a detective job at first. Like, so, so what are these people for? And at first we realized everyone was giving us slightly different answers. 

Well, I'm here on my own agenda. Other people have their own agenda and here are what they're here for. We don't have one specific agenda in here. We don't have demands.

Read 

your sign. 

College degree equals unemployment and lobbyist equals bribery. 

And then thank you Wall 

Street. Thank you Wall 

Street. The first guy there refused to give us his name. The second person is Jillian Cipriano. She's a recent college grad from Staten Island, and she said the main reason she's here is she can't find a job, and it makes her mad, and she's frustrated with the political process.

We ran into a punk from the Lower East Side who was against police brutality. We found grandmothers against the war. This girl from Brooklyn with a list of suggestions supporting everything from the carbon tax to libraries. 

And then we caught up with this guy who said he couldn't stand and talk to us 'cause he was in a rush to get zombified.

Can we walk with you while you... What does getting zombified mean, by the way? 

zombie makeup to make myself represent a dead person. 

Got you. Now, you have a Ron Paul sticker. Sure do. Are, are you a libertarian, would you call yourself? I am, 

definitely. 

And is this... I know e- there's not one view, et cetera, but have you felt welcome here?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is all about community. We're not, we're not trying to marginalize anyone's voices. We're just trying to unite each other, you know? 

During the day, Zuccotti Park has the feel of, like, a festival. Y- you know, there's free food out. People are playing music, wandering around, napping under trees.

I saw a few people smoking joints. And we thought, all right. It's this big park full of independent thinkers, all of different views. Is there, like, a unified thing here? Is there, is, is there some way that this is different from any other park in Manhattan where there's lots of people wandering around doing whatever they feel like?

How does this thing come together and be one thing? 

So everyone told us this park does come together at one point, at night, at seven o'clock. Everyone told us, "You guys have to go to the general assembly. That's where decisions get made that affect this group." So we went. Mic check. 

My name is Jeff. My name is Jeff.

So you probably heard of this. This is the form of communication called the people's mic. The police won't allow bullhorns, so the crowd repeats every phrase said by the person addressing the crowd. 

The night we went, the meeting was being led by two people, facilitators. Facilitators. But before the facilitators can begin facilitating the meeting, this dude in a puffy overcoat leaps out of the crowd to make this point about the facilitators.

These are positions of power. These 

are positions of power. 

They have the power to tell us we can't talk. 

They have the power to tell us we can't talk. 

They lead this discussion in a direction. 

They lead this discussion in a direction. 

If they never ask for our consent- 

If they never ask 

for our consent- Their power is illegitimate 

Their power is illegitimate.

Okay, so there is one rule here, and the rule is that decisions are made by consensus. The group consents to proposals by waving their fingers in the air, kind of like jazz hands, and then if they don't agree, they also do jazz hands, but upside down. And as you can imagine, it's hard to get four hundred people to consent to anything.

But soon enough, the night we went, all four hundred people or so consented to the facilitators facilitating the meeting. 

And so we learned the general assembly, this is where everyone gets together, but there's also these working groups, these subcommittees that meet throughout the day, the sanitation committee, the finance committee, the legal committee, and they all report back to the general assembly.

And so the night we were there, the comfort committee had a proposal about how to allocate some of the tens of thousands of dollars that have been donated to the group. 

We need sleeping bags. We need sleeping bags. Sleeping bags cost money. 

Sleeping 

bags cost money. We would like to request- We would like to request- About $2,000 About $2,000 

So people had a lot of questions for Sleeping Bag Man about his proposal.

Does the proposal include a sales tax, which goes to the government? How will the sleeping bags be kept clean? 

My question is more pragmatic. My question is more pragmatic. Should we not just buy fabric- 

Should we not just buy fabric- ... 

and construct- Should we not just buy fabric- ... and construct sleeping bags?

and construct sleeping bags? 

And Zoe, what we s- realized was this general assembly, this isn't just some logistical asterisk to the protest. This is what this whole thing is about. This is what they're for. This process itself, participatory democracy, that is what this group is demanding. 

I found an ex-Marine on the sidelines, Brian Phillips.

He said exactly that. 

We have people speak, everyone votes on it, and we come to an agreement, and that's how we want society to be. 

That is how you want society to 

be? Yes. I don't think that this is by any means an efficient, particularly effective or, or the only direct democracy process. It's not. 

This is Andrew Smith.

He's facilitated a couple times at the general assembly. 

There are many other models. This is the one we got, and we're going with it, you know? And it, and it works to empower some people. I mean, 

it would be more effective, I would think, like if you had this many people say, and they were all for or against some specific thing.

But- Like, "We're all for the Volcker Rule. Let's just go nuts and in, in favor of the Volcker Rule," you know? Of 

course, it would be more effective. It would be more effective. 

But you say, "Of course it would be more effective," like that's a horrible thing to be. Is effective bad? 

effective will disenfranchise people around here.

People will feel like they're not getting their voices heard. They'll feel like the, the, the move, the f- the effect is moving in a direction that they do not agree with, and they will quit the movement. 

It seems like that whole, this whole organization of Occupy Wall Street is like a structure for people to bring their issues to and put them on, not like you have your own issue that you're fomenting.

Yes. Yes. I like it. 

Is 

that- I agree. Agreed. 

I just made that up. 

Perfect. You're a venue, not a movement. That's what it's all about. 

Yeah, 

exactly. Sure. Awesome. You guys can run with that. There's the narrative right there. We ca- we got it. I think we got it. 

It's a venue, not a movement. Standing around and discussing what they want, that's what they want.

That's their hope.

Today, the entire city of Oakland, California, was subject to what they call a general strike. According to the suggested chant list from the Occupy Oakland folks, the idea is, "Strike, occupy, shut it down. Oakland is the people's town." Also, "Every hour, every day, the occupation is here to stay." You get the basic idea.

What you're looking at right now is live footage, live footage, of the general strike in Oakland tonight. Now, the idea of a strike is, is usually pretty narrow, right? It's a pretty narrowly targeted idea. It's the people who work at a specific place stopping working there in order to get that place to treat them better as employees.

That's the idea of a strike. The idea of a general strike is not a targeted action against any one place of business, against any one employer. It's general. It is less about raising a beef with one particular target of the strike than it is about establishing that the people striking are all on the same side together.

Oakland has had a general strike before. It was 1946, right after the end of World War II. There was a, a sort of not huge-scale labor dispute in Oakland. Retail store clerks went on strike against some downtown department stores because they wanted better pay and better conditions. There were picket lines.

there were some heated confrontations. There were people arrested. But it was proceeding pretty much as you would expect out of your average labor strike. Until it became not just a dispute between those stores and the people who worked for those stores, but rather a dispute in which the police intervened forcibly on the side of the stores against the people who were striking, against the employees 

They beat us all out of the alleys pushed us with those damn billy clubs.

I was black and blue here for months. The trucks followed right behind them, went on in, and unloaded. Then they went back to get more. It wasn't bringing in strikebreakers necessarily that started the general strike. You know, I thought about that a lot since that. We'd seen strikebreakers, but the thing was using the police force that we were paying taxes for to beat us off our own streets.

The police don't work for the stores any more than they work for the striking workers, right? Police aren't supposed to take a side in a labor dispute. They're just supposed to enforce the law. But that morning in December 1946, when people saw police breaking the strike up, siding against the workers and bringing in the strikebreakers, the general strike just spontaneously happened.

Bus drivers saw what was happening. They parked their buses, got out of them and left them sitting there. People working at other businesses just walked away from their jobs. It was a spontaneous general strike, a spontaneous taking sides with those store employees who sort of otherwise had been doing their own thing.

The general strike in Oakland in the 40s was not a big organized union-led thing, actually. It happened spontaneously. It went on for two and a half days. Maybe this is apocryphal, but the way they tell the story of it now in Oakland is that in the 1946 strike, every business in the city was shut down for two days and a bit.

The only businesses that were allowed to stay open during the strike were food stores and pharmacies so people could get their medicine and also bars, but bars with an asterisk. Bars would be allowed to stay open during the strike, the general strike in 1946. This may be apocryphal, but this is what they say.

Only if they agreed to two conditions. One, they could only serve beer and not hard liquor. And two, they had to agree to put their jukeboxes out on the sidewalk so all the general strikers could enjoy the music. This year, Occupy Oakland started as one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of Occupy encampments that have sprung up all over the country to stand up for the 99%, right?

Stand up for the 99% of Americans who are underserved by our economy and by our political system, which has been captured by the 1%. But on October 25th of this year, the actions of the Oakland police again helped turn what had been a sort of small, sort of isolated movement, at least comparatively speaking, into a much, much larger movement.

Before the Oakland police made the bad decision to wage essentially a shock and awe campaign of militarized force against that little protest in downtown Oakland, before that, this was about the size of that protest, a few dozen tents and a few hundred people in Oakland. Since the actions of the Oakland police on October 25th, the protests have not only come back, look, they are now much larger, much, much larger than they were before.

Even San Francisco across the Bay, a very progressive city in its own right and a much bigger one, does not have as much support, as many people, as many energy now as Occupy Oakland does. And with this renewed energy, which again comes in part thanks to police making a very bad decision about how to treat this on October 25th, Occupy Oakland today decided to do what Oakland does.

They called for a general strike across the entire city. Today, thousands of Oakland residents took to the streets for what were reportedly, reportedly by local press calling these things the largest demonstration in the East Bay since the days of the Vietnam War. And in the East Bay, that's where Berkeley is.

They know something about demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The Occupy Oakland demonstrators, along with hundreds of teachers and students and nurses, marched through downtown Oakland today, gathering at the city's biggest banks in a show of force that is set to culminate tonight at the Port of Oakland.

The Port of Oakland, of course, the fifth-biggest port in the country, one of the major conduits of imports from China into our country. The Oakland police remained mostly on the sidelines today. A number of local businesses, including some of those banks, just closed their doors today. Some city and port workers were sent home early today.

Oakland School District reported that 18% of the city's teach for- teacher force joined the strike today. But again, this is not a labor strike. This is not a specific strike against a specific organization or a specific business. This is a general strike, which is a rare thing, and it means that it is not about taking on any one business to try to get them to change.

In fact, a lot of businesses in Oakland, not just the Grand Lake Theater, support the idea of standing up for the 99%. for example, the Men's Warehouse clothing stores put up these signs today, "We stand with the 99%. Closed Wednesday, November 2nd." While some businesses in Oakland closed altogether today, some stayed open but decided to go cash only so that the big banks and credit card companies would not be taking their pound of flesh from those local businesses today.

But again, this is general, right? This, th- there is not a specific target. There's not a specific agenda. This is about saying the system shouldn't only work for the rich, period.

For the entirety of the life of our nation, democracy has been protected, not merely by the strenuous efforts of those of us who cherish it, but mostly and most profoundly by the limitless stupidity of those who would ration it, keep it for themselves and themselves alone, or destroy it.

The protests that ended the war in Vietnam reached critical mass only in 1970, when Governor James Rhodes of Ohio pounded on a desk at a news conference and called the student protesters at Kent State University un-American. They were not un-American. They were unarmed, and the next day, four of them were shot and killed by the National Guard, and 10 days later, two more were killed at Jackson State.

Those protests had themselves only gone mainstream 20 months earlier, when Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago overreacted with mindlessness and sadism to the massing of demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the whole world watched. A century of the institutionalized, codified, legalized pseudo-slavery that had followed the real thing was fatally stricken only when Governor George Wallace of Alabama used his inaugural address to promise segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

Within two years came the marches on Selma and the atrocities at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and 10 weeks after the first violence, the president had proposed the Voting Rights Act to Congress. The mounting paranoia of three decades of the scapegoating of and fear-mongering about liberals only ended when its last white knight self-destructed on the national stage of televised hearings, when Joe McCarthy questioned the loyalty of the US military and, towards one junior attorney, he revealed the depths of his cruelty and megalomania, and he revealed that at long last he indeed had no shame.

Pick any moment in our history, our history as a country founded by and invigorated by and reinvigorated by protest, and you will find men like George Wallace and Joe McCarthy and Jim Rhodes and Richard Daley. Go back further to men like the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, or the officials who sent the police to the Haymarket Square and the troops to the Pullman Town, or John Brown, or George Grenville, the British politician who had a bright idea about the American colonies, an idea called the Stamp Act.

American freedom has not flourished in spite of these morons of history. It has flourished because of them, because they overreacted, because they under-thought, overreached, under-understood. We owe them our traditions of protest. We owe them our freedoms. We owe them our very independence. None of them ever understood that, around these parts anyway, suppression always creates the opposite of the effect desired.

Such a man is Michael Rubens Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, and as of today, the most valuable, the most essential, the most irreplaceable man inside the Occupy movement. Who else but a cliche like Bloomberg could take a protest beginning to grow a little stale around its edges and vault it back into the headlines, complete with mortifying scenes of police dressed up as stormtroopers, carrying military weapons, using figurative bazookas to kill figurative mosquitoes?

Who else but an archetype like Bloomberg could claim a group of protesters was making too much noise in a residential area, and then choose to try to disperse them by bringing out LRAD audio cannons, machines that send painful waves of sound indiscriminately over the very same residential area? Who else but a cartoon like Bloomberg could have become rich creating a multi-billion dollar media and news company, and then authorize illegally preventing reporters from witnessing police actions he claimed were utterly legal, and then authorize the arrest of four reporters at a church?

Who else but a human platitude like Bloomberg could have just gotten back from Jerusalem and the dedication of a $10 million medical facility for which he generously paid, and then enabled the image of policemen seizing 5,500 books from the Occupy Wall Street library and throwing them in a dumpster as if the cops were book burners?

Who else but a hypocrite like Bloomberg could have overridden by backroom deal with the New York City Council, the results of two separate referendums limiting those in his office to just two terms as mayor so he could serve a third term, and then have had his police arrest, beat up, and in- incarcerate a member of the New York City Council?

Who else but a putz like Bloomberg could have insisted that protesters were not above the rule of law, and yet when the courts ruled he could not seize the protesters' tents and sleeping bags, nor kick them out of Zuccotti Park, nor keep them from returning with their tents and sleeping bags? Who else could have stalled for hours until he could find another judge to give him the ruling he insisted upon?

Who else but the epitome of tone deafness that is Bloomberg could have better illustrated the fundamental issue of Occupy when he puts the entire weight of the most people-driven city in the history of the Earth behind already crushingly rich and their efforts to grab themselves still more advantages from those people, and he himself is the 12th richest man in America.

Who else but a publicity addict like Bloomberg could have enabled the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, and yet two months later, frozen 20 square miles of New York City in gridlock traffic over two days so somebody could film another goddamn Batman movie on the 59th Street Bridge, leading to the inescapable conclusion that if you wanna tie up a little traffic during a protest for equality and freedom from corporate domination on a bridge in New York City, you will be arrested.

But if you wanna tie up all the traffic during a goddamned movie shoot for the financial benefit of corporate domination, the city of New York will embrace you and give you tax breaks. Michael Bloomberg, no such a figure, no such a living, breathing embodiment of all that is wrong and all that is stupid in the establishment in this country could be ordered up from the works of fiction or the casting calls of that goddamn Batman movie they filmed the weekend before he ordered the raid on Occupy Wall Street Obviously, Mayor Bloomberg, you should resign, and your little bully of a police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, should go with you.

You have overstepped all reasonable interpretations of your rights and responsibilities, and you have made Americans and people around the world realize that you are simply smaller, more embarrassing versions of the tin pot tyrants who have fallen around the globe in the past year. But as some of us first thought you might be back on that fateful September afternoon that sadistic cops pepper sprayed four women who had already been trapped inside a police overreaction, and as we thought again the following weekend during the arrests on Brooklyn Bridge, Michael Bloomberg, you have now indeed become the symbol of the Occupy movement.

You are ready to take your historic place with Mayor Daley and Governor Wallace and Senator McCarthy and Prime Minister Grenville, and every other idiot who has made the fateful and fatal mistake of thinking that just because he had power and money, that this was a nation in which everything has a price tag on it.

We need you, Michael Bloomberg. We need you to keep making these mistakes. Tone-deaf, sensibility-offending, world-changing mistakes, like the pepper spray and the Brooklyn Bridge, and the paramilitary assault on Occupy Wall Street last night. Hell, Mike, the freedoms of this wonderful and transcendent nation corrupted by the endless greed of you and the other dozen richest people in it, and the corporations who nevertheless have still managed to own you somehow, these freedoms will not be restored to us in just the next two years.

I'm endorsing you for a fourth term. Your nation needs you, Mr. Mayor. Occupy needs you. Bloomberg now, Bloomberg tomorrow, Bloomberg forever

Occupy Wall Street continues, and what I think is the single most absurd and compelling and horrifying piece of video so far, and I know we've seen videos of downtown Oakland looking like a war zone, literally like a war zone. We've seen people getting punched, people getting beaten with, police nightsticks after the policeman reaches above their head and smacks down.

But something about the video of police at UC Davis pepper spraying a crowd of people that is sitting there... That's it. They're just sitting there. We've looked at the videos a bunch of times now, Louis, and I'm gonna play this for you. There's a couple of angles on this, and if you're just listening, what's going on here is that a police officer is, walking over, and he, he just opens up with this pepper spray.

I mean, how would you describe it? He, 

he basically just walks down the line. There's, there's a line of people sitting. He just casually, slowly walks down the line while holding the spray and just hits them all in the face. 

From, how would you say six to, six to eight inches away, right? 

He's not very far away.

Okay, here's the video and the audio for you to take a look and listen.

I mean, it's like a thick stream, and the people are just sitting there. Nobody's, nobody's doing anything. And this guy's just spraying people over and over again. Who could have thought that this was a good idea? Like, how did the police officer get into his mind, "They're all sitting there. I'm gonna walk down the line and pepper spray everybody," with what almost looks like a novelty...

I mean, who even thinks that that's what it looks like? In the past when I've seen pepper spray, it's like individual, very thin, like, a very thin stream. But this is- Mm-hmm ... like a sustained... Like, it's, it's under pressure. It's 

pretty, pretty thick. 

Exactly. Yeah. 

yeah, I mean, like we pointed out to each other before- 

Yeah

while looking at a picture they're surrounded by people with cameras. 

Right. 

And they know that. So I guess clearly they thought they were within their rights, right? 

they must have thought this was an appropriate use of force. Yeah. And if your goal is to get people to stop resisting, nobody's resisting.

Everybody's already just sitting there 

quietly. Right, right. I mean, clearly they're accomplishing nothing except wasting, expensive spray- I think- ... and fueling people's desire to, to be out there. 

Here's another angle of it that I'll show you, and, and you can see... I don't know if, what, what this reveals.

So there they go. And just ca- very casually, the guy's doing it almost like you would walk down your garden and just casually trim off... You know, you might just, like, pull a weed out of your driveway. You're just kind of- Mm-hmm ... very casually walking around, looking around. But the guy's pepper spraying people- Yeah

indiscriminately. 

And it's not like they're blocking a major street. I mean, clearly this is just a sidewalk. 

They're re- they are... They're refusing to leave, and that's the reason that's being given, but you're right. They're not... I, I mean, this is- I mean, the cop, the cop- ... this is a nonviolent protest ... 

the cop walked over them.

Yeah. He, yeah. He stepped over them carefully- He literally stepped over them ... to then pepper spray them in the face. Yeah. Yeah. Now listen, at least the guy had the c- common decency of a, of a police officer to not stand right on top of them or behind them. He had the courtesy to walk around the protesters to then be in front to indiscriminately spray, spray pepper spray all over them.

Right. 

Is that... Can we say that at least, if nothing else, about the police? 

I think, I guess that's fair, yeah

Sociologist Ruth Milkman and co-authors wrote, quote, "OWS was not a spontaneous movement that appeared out of nowhere. It was carefully planned by a group of experienced political activists, newly inspired by the Arab Spring and the surge of mass protest around the world in the first half of 2011." That may be true, but what Occupy became went well beyond anything that planners had imagined, and many people who became active participants didn't have much political experience at all, particularly as occupations spread beyond New York to cities all over the place.

Meanwhile, most everyone on the left at the time, as far as I can recall, was absolutely shocked that Occupy took off and exploded the way that it did. What did Occupy seem like at the beginning? What did you make of it? And then what did it become? I 

mean, the, the one thing is that it was planned. It had been planned for months by a group calling themselves the New York General Assembly, and this was a small rotating group of a few dozen folks, if that.

One of them was my good friend David Graeber, the late and great anthropologist and writer who would really, come into national prominence during Occupy Wall Street, which coincided with the publication of his book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. That was an international bestseller And so it was, it was planned.

They had different working groups within this assembly. They focused on media, communications. They came up with the slogan, "We are the 99%", the frame of the 99%. They actually decided in those meetings, which happened weekly in Tompkins Square Park, they decided not to have demands for strategic reasons, and we can get into that 'cause I think they were right.

And they had a tactical group. It was this group that had, had scouted Zuccotti Park and knew that it was there and had actually knew about its legal status. There, there was even a group of them that did a trial run where they tried to s- to spend the night at the New York Stock Exchange sleeping on the sidewalk, and the results were pretty bad.

I think nine people got arrested, so it wasn't very promising. So David Graeber, you know, was very direct. He's said in interviews, I think he even said in the Milkman piece that you just referenced, "I didn't think we'd make it through the night. I thought we'd get arrested." And that was what I thought as well, because I had spent the aughts in New York City protesting under the shadow of the war on terror, when you would...

It just felt like you would, come into public space and be kettled. there was impossible to get a critical mass. Maybe you'd be shunted into a free speech pen. Gatherings of over 20 people were illegal, and this was not a group that was asking for a permit, right? So I, on the one hand, yes, this group was planning an occupation, but I don't think they thought they were gonna make it through the night.

It's also important to give the context, and you mentioned the Arab Spring. If we think of that as the beginning of Occupy, then things actually kick up- kick off in Tunisia in December of 2010 when a vegetable seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, he was being harassed by the police, and in protest he immolated himself.

And that energy was circulating around the globe. And so Occupy felt, it felt really late to the game. Of course, there was also the financial crisis that it was responding to. And so there had been a call from Adbusters, the Canadian magazine, and it was about as minimal as you could get. The call was, "Occupy Wall Street, September 17th."

Bring a tent, stay for months 

And there was a little dancer on top of the Wall Street bull 

Yeah, and it, it said 20,000 people. The people who were planning Occupy Wall Street were like, "Stay for months with 20,000 people?" it was totally disconnected from reality on the ground. And so they set their own ambitions.

They, set their own terms. September 17th was completely arbitrary. It was picked because it was the birthday of one of the editors of AdBuster's mother, right? It was completely random, and the fact that it took off was a testament to the folks who were planning it, some of whom included people who were online rabble-rousers and connected to Anonymous, was, which was another big social trend at the time.

It was, in a way, the most vibrant political force in the United States, which I think is a real contrast to where we are now. So there were people who were trying to organize and translate online discontent and rebelliousness into, to offline action, which is always difficult. And it just felt very improbable that it would take off.

And the other thing I'll say as context is that there, there were attempts in that period to mobilize movements against Wall Street. There had been a multi-week occupation called Bloombergville that was targeting the city budget and the mayor. That lasted a couple weeks, but definitely didn't grab national headlines.

There had been a massive march in May of 2011. I went to it. I can't even remember it, but I know I went to it from emails, but it was so boring that I don't even have a memory of it, but it had lots of great demands. A huge number of people in comparison to those early days of Occupy showed up, and yet it didn't do anything in terms of lighting a fire.

So it, it was interesting. I, I don't know what it was about Occupy, but it was... I'm sure that it had to do with the audacity of it and the fact people just stayed put. There was also, a radicalization against the police. There was a lot- Yeah ... of kind of naive, the police are part of the 99%- Right

messaging. I don't know if you remember, there was this hipster cop who became iconic at Occupy. 

He was like a plainclothes, nattily dressed, young hipster-looking cop. 

Right, but he was still a fucking cop, Yep And these things became more apparent the week of the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge when over 700 people were arrested.

There was a donation of $4.6 million from Jamie Diamond. Dimon, sorry. He needs to have that D on the end of his name. 

I know. I think that's what I thought his name was for a long time. 

to the NYPD, And basically the sense of yeah, Wall Street and the NYPD are working together and one and the same.

And that, I think, in no way can that, can you take credit for the amazing work against the criminal pushent- punishment system and police that's happening today, but I think it was really radicalizing for a lot of people- Who were part of Occupy, who had never had hostile encounters with the police before, to see just the wanton violence and the contempt that they were treated with.

Yeah. And it, it did start, I think Occupy in a lot of complex ways did start to intersect with what were really BLM precursors. Around Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia during Occupy's early days on September 21st, and then around Trayvon Martin's murder, which took place just a few months after Occupy started.

And then as you're saying, the NYPD had a major impact on the course of Occupy, and I feel like the repression mostly pretty much backfired, which is not to trivialize or romanticize what in some cases were pretty horrible costs of this repression, including really, a really serious injury suffered by the Iraq War vet Scott Olsen in Oakland.

But there was all of this repression, and though activists obviously and rightly decried police abuses at the time, it seems to me like it did more good for the movement by helping draw more attention to it than it did in terms harm, than it did harm in terms of by taking people off the streets and putting them in jail.

Because both the September 24th mass arrests and pepper spraying of activ- activists and then the October 1st march across the Brooklyn b- Bridge, which as you mentioned led to the NYPD making more than 700 arrests, these were both things that generated just like massive amounts of attention 

Yeah, it is true.

Occupy was catapulted into the mainstream media by these incidents and by these viral videos of police violence. there were some too that, we forget, but that were really major. So I remember this young activist Ma- Megan Linick, and I actually had her write an account of it, filmed on her BlackBerry, so that dates this movement.

as these NYU students were going to a Chase branch to close their accounts in protest, and the cops started basically dragging people from the sidewalk into the bank and beating them up and arresting them all when they were just going in there in a very... They weren't doing a sit-in. They were just saying, "I'm against your role in the financial crisis.

I'm closing my account," for which they were arrested and held for over 30 hours. S- And that video got over a million views, and that was novel at the time, right? To have these moments be transmitted and circulated. A lot of that was Anonymous was amplifying these things, and they had such an enormous reach on- online.

And I think Occupy, what people had to get their minds around was that cops protect capital. That's who they are serving. They're protecting property, not people, and ultimately they're protecting profits, and that's actually something that is a really core insight. And they were there to smash heads when the time came, and I saw a lot of people get thrashed my time at Occupy, and certainly it was happening.

I think there were over 8,000 Occupy affiliated arrests around- Wow ... the country, and millions of dollars. I think Oakland paid out over $10 or $11 million of damages. So the public's paying for that, too. We're paying for the violence that these, that these forces are perpetrating.

We've just heard clips starting with

Countdown presenting the Occupy Wall Street movement's formal statement of grievances against corporations.

owned a third of all U.S. net worth at the time.

On the Media explored whether Occupy Wall Street could become a lasting movement, with historian Michael Kazin arguing it needs organization.

Planet Money visited Zuccotti Park to figure out what Occupy Wall Street protesters wanted, and discovered the participatory democracy of the nightly General Assembly was itself partly the demand.

The Rachel Maddow Show traced Oakland's general strike back to 1946, when police siding with department stores against striking clerks sparked a spontaneous two-and-a-half-day citywide walkout.

Countdown also compared Bloomberg's police raids, book seizures, and reporter arrests at Occupy to historical overreactions by George Wallace, Joe McCarthy, and Mayor Richard Daley.

David Pakman gave his initial reaction to the viral UC Davis video of a police officer, memed as “Casually Pepper Spray Everyt

that unexpectedly catapulted the movement into the mainstream.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

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As for today's topic,

As is almost always the case, the progressive left tends to be right too soon. Someone has to be the first to say it, after all, before everyone else gets comfortable with the idea. This is how the Overton window, the range of acceptable political opinions, shifts over time, and with occasional backsliding, it's generally the progressive left that gets to a position first, which nearly everyone else will have adopted 20 years later.

I think it's inarguable that, 15 years after Occupy Wall Street, the language and sentiment about our rigged economy and rigged politics that they helped push into the mainstream have been effectively adopted across the political spectrum.

Biden left office warning of an oligarchy and Trump has always run as a fake economic populist. That message was strong enough, combined with his nativism and racism, to trick a substantial slice of the country into voting for a billionaire with the explicit hope that he would be their weapon against a rigged economy built to serve the billionaire class. That's how effective that messaging was.

There was a poll from The Economist and YouGov in January of this year that found 67% of Republicans say the rich have too much political power, and 39% of them say billionaires are taxed too little, versus only 11% who said they were taxed too much.

I say frequently that it's easier to diagnose a problem than to identify the most effective solution. The problem of the impact of the wealthy on U.S. politics has spread widely across both parties, but both have come up short when trying to find the solution.

Trump managed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party based on lies about what he would do to benefit everyday people. His current, near-record-low approval numbers speak volumes on how that's playing out.

As for Democrats, The New Republic reported in March of this year that 70% of moderate Democratic voters say the party is too timid on taxing the rich and corporations, while under 5% say they're too aggressive.

The gravitational pull in both parties, away from the previous status quo, toward economic populism is clear as day, and its origins can be traced back through the 2008 collapse and Occupy Wall Street, which propelled the language of the 99% into the general consciousness.

Today, there's still a battle going on between moderates and progressives in the Democratic Party, but the fact that moderates are adopting progressive economics as part of their platforms shows the impact of the shift that's happened in the past 15 years. The problem comes when they say the right things but don't follow through because they're not receiving enough pressure to overcome the knee jerk reaction to serve their corporate donors.

Progressives will never unseat every moderate but they don't have to. The winds of change are at our backs so having enough progressives to form a reliable voting bloc that can exert pressure on the rest of the party, combined with the general sentiment moving in the direction of economic populism will give those moderates the permission they feel they need to go along with progressive positions. We've been saying it for twenty years, since back in the Bush-tax-cut days and people have finally caught up with us.

As for the electoral battle between progressives and moderates playing out in Democratic primaries this year, I think there's a misunderstood dynamic that's worth correcting.

If a progressive wins a primary, then it's perfectly legitimate to conclude that those voters have a genuine preference for that candidate's platform or that it was inspiring enough to drive greater turnout among their supporters. Pretty straightforward.

Moderates will say that the opposite is also true. If a moderate wins a primary election, it's evidence that Democratic voters simply prefer their moderate positions, but this is not nearly as straightforward. Democratic primary voters very often cast their vote out of fear rather than conviction. They practice a sort of defensive pessimism combined with an attempted divination about how general election voters will act and, I argue, it's mostly based on a misreading of the political spectrum.

The assumption for my whole life has been that any general election candidate needs to be able to pull over some moderates to win and any candidate running on the far left or right won't be able to do that, thereby making moderate candidates more electable by definition. This used to be far more true than it is today.

Politics has shifted wildly in the past few decades. People from the left, right, and center all want to see more drastic action taken in the direction of economic populism. This means that a progressive economic populist may very well have more of a chance to pull in voters from outside the core of Democratic Party supporters than a moderate who offers essentially nothing to anyone who isn't within that moderate Democratic base.

It's been hard to run that experiment because Democratic primary voters are the ones who get to decide whether that experiment gets run in the general. Those Democrats are the ones most likely to be risk-averse, even when they prefer the policies of the progressive in the race.

Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist running for governor in Wisconsin, lost her primary in August by less than a point and the electability fear was measurable before a vote was cast. In Marquette's July poll, 80 percent of Democratic primary voters said it was extremely or very important to pick someone who could beat the Republican in November, and in that same poll Hong trailed the Republican, Congressman Tom Tiffany, by three. A late endorsement from Governor Tony Evers for the moderate in the race, David Crowley, and nearly all the late-deciders following that lead gave the vote to Crowley even though Hong had been leading the polls.

One voter told PBS, "I think she's going to have trouble winning."

That's a group of people trying to prognosticate what other people will do in November, and voting in the primary based on that guess. No one should read that as a verdict on her platform.

This creates a scenario where the argument being made by moderate Democrats becomes nearly unfalsifiable because they argue that progressives can't win general elections and, therefore, that they shouldn't be allowed to try.

On the flip side, there actually are examples that progressives can point to. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won the mayor's race in New York, is the biggest one in recent years and, despite what has happened to Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman since his election, it's important to remember that he won that election running as an economic populist.

Meanwhile, it's good to keep in mind that the labor movement, decimated as it has been by neoliberalism, is still fighting back with concrete plans.

The United Auto Workers led the way by scheduling their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028 and called on other unions to join in, setting the stage for a potential mass strike event on May Day in a presidential election year.

Occupy made the strategic decision to focus on the messaging and, for the most part, refused to have demands. They spent a lot of time and energy literally occupying space and taking up time in the news and the general zeitgeist, but refused to answer what it was they actually wanted.

The result, as I've said, is that Occupy ultimately won on messaging but the country lost on what our politics managed to deliver. The rhetoric of Occupy and the anger at Wall Street got misdirected by many into Donald Trump, while the Democratic Party structure and the core Democratic primary voters failed to heed the call for economic populism, both acting in their own ways to keep Bernie Sanders away from the general election, mostly out of fear that he wouldn't be electable.

This isn't an argument that Occupy necessarily should have done a better job making demands, counterfactuals are difficult. If they had, maybe they wouldn't have ended up winning on the rhetoric or the demands, we'll never know.

But, fifteen years later, with the rhetoric and sentiment of Occupy firmly established across our political spectrum, the demands and strategies are continuing to take shape.

Progressives are running against establishment Democrats, pulling the Overton window and the center of political gravity toward economic populism. The labor movement is making plans that stretch beyond the next contract negotiation and the next election.

All while Donald Trump continues to demonstrate on a daily basis how empty his promises were, cratering support for his brand of populism, and leaving people ready to look elsewhere.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, THE STATE STRIKES BACK

Followed by Section B, RIGGED SYSTEM, RIGGED COVERAGE

Section C, WHAT THE MOVEMENT WAS DOING

And Section D, THE LEGACY, 10 YEARS ON

A few years after the end of World War I, Congress passed a law saying that veterans of that war were entitled to a bonus for their service. In 1924, Congress said American veterans of the First World War had earned a bonus of $1,000. But here's the catch: it could not be paid for about 20 more years.

They couldn't collect it until 1945, or, or their families could collect it upon their death if that came before 1945. Well, along the way, the country fell into the Great Depression. Americans were starving to death. They were on bread lines, and the veterans, who knew that thousand dollars was owed to them by the government, decide that they would much rather collect that now, please.

That money was owed to them, they had earned it, and they needed it to feed their families now. So in the spring of 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, the veterans marched into Washington because they wanted payment of that bonus they had earned in World War I. They were called the Bonus Army.

The Bonus Army set up as an encampment in Washington, D.C., tens of thousands of people in a living political protest. History tells us that they kept their instant city clean. They integrated their camp racially, which was really quite radical at the time. We know that they grew gardens for food. They settled in for as long as it might take to make their point to Congress and to then President Herbert Hoover.

At least that's what the Bonus Army hoped. The head of the U.S. Army, General Douglas MacArthur, looked out at the peaceful protest of those veterans camping out and saw an embarrassment for his commander in chief. MacArthur mustered troops on horseback against the veterans camp and followed those horses with tanks.

The destruction began. 

Then troops began to set fire to their wooden shacks. One reporter wrote, "The blaze was so big it lit the whole sky. A nightmare come to life." The president looked out a window of the White House in the direction of the fire, then retired for the night 

And the roaring flames sound the death knell to the fantastic bonus army that ends so disastrously in the shadow of the Capitol of the United States of America.

Two US veterans were killed that day, but the movement grew. What does not kill you makes you stronger, they say. News of the raid, the first footage of what had happened, reached Americans in movie houses on newsreels that they used to show in theaters before the main feature. As Frank Rich describes in New York Magazine this week, when Americans saw those newsreels of MacArthur's army destroying the veterans' protest camp, Americans applauded the bonus army.

They cheered for the bonus army. They booed General MacArthur. Yesterday, these images began to reach Americans. It's the police in Oakland, California, breaking up the Occupy Wall Street protest there, Occupy Oakland. Part of the Occupy Wall Street movement is, for economic justice. This one in California, the police moved in with batons swinging.

They tore down tents and smashed signs. They sent tear gas grenades into the crowd. The cops are also alleged to have fired rubber bullets, something they are denying, despite injuries to protesters that look like they were caused by rubber bullets. The police admit to firing beanbag rounds, though.

Frankly, when you look at the footage of this, it rather looked and sounded like a small war. Washington, D.C., 1932, the raid on the bonus army. Oakland, California, 2011, the raid on Occupy Oakland, Occupy Wall Street. Two American scenes separated by almost a century. But put the old one in color, throw on some plaid shirts, and you almost could not tell them apart.

In his story this week in New York Magazine, Frank Rich tells the story of the bonus army and of Occupy Wall Street. He titles it, quote, "The Class War Has Begun."

By most accounts, the police crackdown on the Occupy Oakland encampment on October 25th was severe. Tear gas, flashbang grenades, and beanbags were fired at protesters, and some protesters exhibited bruising from what they claimed were rubber bullets fired by police when they attempted to reclaim their encampment.

In the most serious injury of an Occupy protester so far, Scott Thomas Olsen, a twenty-four-year-old Iraq veteran, had his skull fractured when he was struck by a tear gas canister during the Tuesday night events. The injury left Olsen in critical condition. Reading about these events in the nation's capital, though, you got a different impression.

The Washington Post, which has experience in minimizing the Wall Street protests, ran a short AP dispatch about events in Oakland under the headline, "Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide." And the photo the Post chose to run with the AP story? A police officer bending over to pet a cat with a caption explaining that the animal had been left behind by protesters evicted from the city park.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza for a firsthand view of the festival of antisemitism at Occupy Wall Street. He found none, and he declared that fact on October twenty-fourth, writing, quote, "I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry.

Not a sign, not a book, and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to Google the phrase 'Zionists control Wall Street,'" close quote. Cohen says right-wing attempts to smear the Occupy movement for antisemitism are reprehensible. But it turns out that's just a setup to his smearing them with a bunch of other stuff, like slogans he says, quote, "Suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans."

Close quote. Cohen calls Occupy Wall Street, quote, "A tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." Close quote. It's a media event that has captured the flea thoughts of many Americans, and it's, quote, "Above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover."

Close quote. Finally, for good measure, Cohen tosses in the idea that the right-wing smears of the Occupy movement are themselves the fault of the left, because such smears originate in the, quote, "Devious tactics of the old left adopted by the new right." Close quote. And that's no accident, because the, quote, "Practitioners are the descendants of lefties."

Close quote. So antisemitic? No. Clueless, repugnant, silly, chubby, something about fleas and themselves to blame for being called antisemitic? Yes.

At the University of California's campus at Berkeley, which everybody calls Cal, outside the administration building there, there's a big empty plaza space. and at the top of a sort of a short run of stairs from the administration area down to that plaza, there is a plaque that's embedded in the steps, and it names those steps the Mario Savio Steps.

this is Mario Savio. you're about to hear Mario Savio in a moment, and I'll just tell you for context, the President Kerr that you hear him mention, President Kerr was president of the University of California at the time that Mario Savio was speaking here. The context here is that the students were trying to overturn a ban on political activity on campus.

They wanted, free speech rights to advocate for political causes on campus, and they're protesting here against the university president and the university's board of regents. Check this out. 

We were told the following. If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the regents in his telephone conversations, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect?

And the answer we received from a well-meaning liberal was the following. He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" That's the answer. I ask you to consider, if this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something, the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material.

But we're a bunch of raw material that don't mean to be, have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone. 

We're human beings.

We're human beings. It was Mario Savio. His big speech that day at Cal in 1964 culminated, with this famous rallying cry to the students who had assembled there. 

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even possibly take part.

And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all 

That was December 1964.

and from that very famous speech, there's a little bit of video from that speech, which you've just seen there. There are some still images and there is some audio of Mario Savio's entire speech. The record of this event in terms of the media available to us now, it's sort of patchwork-y. 

That doesn't mean that you have to break anything.

1,000 people sitting down someplace, not letting anybody by, not letting anything happen can stop any machine, including this machine, and it will stop. 

Mario Savio. Part of him there talking about putting your body on the gears of the machine, you have heard that before, right? That, that became one of the iconic rhetorical moments of the whole decade of the 1960s, and there weren't very many of those moments from 1964 on the West Coast.

But it was, it, it was like he was talking about how to stop the Vietnam War. It was like he was talking about how to stop segregation. It was like he was talking about big national issues, and allegorically, maybe he was talking about those bigger issues. But in the moment, what he was talking about, as you heard there, was free speech, was students' rights, students' rights to be protesting at the University of California.

This was a huge confrontation between the students and the university, between the students and the police, and it was over a very local campus free speech issue. And even though the free speech movement faced huge hostility at the time, there were more than 800 arrests, the largest number of arrests of students in US history up until that point.

30 years later, the school put up a plaque for Mario Savio. They named the steps where he spoke there to honor the most articulate and powerful of the free speech movement student organizers at that spot. And at that spot this month, at that plaza where Cal put up the plaque to mark the success of the free speech movement, here's what happened on Wednesday.

Here they come. Here they come.

Riot police breaking up an Occupy Wall Street demonstration at Cal's supposed Free Speech Plaza last week on Wednesday. Here's the thing, though. Since that massive police show of force on November 9th, the protesters there, are back. Today they organized a day of action at Cal that included classes being taught outside and a march from Cal's Sproul Plaza, the home of Mario Savio Steps, to a local public high school, Berkeley High, and to Berkeley City College.

Cal's annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture was already scheduled to be taking place tonight. It was scheduled to be held this year in some ballroom on campus. But thanks to a request from the Occupy Cal protesters, the Mario Savio lecture tonight will be held outdoors. It will be held outdoors where that plaque is at Sproul Plaza, where those cops beat up those protesting students just last week.

At this hour, the student protesters are reportedly planning to erect tents on the grass near where the lecture is to be given. Because of that, they say they expect a confrontation with police. They expect to be removed from the Free Speech Memorial Plaza again, maybe in the middle of the Mario Savio Free Speech Memorial Lecture.

Mario Savio's widow put out a statement to- yesterday saying that the, the lecture was gonna be moved outside, quote, "In protest against the use of excessive police force against non-violent demonstrators." She said, "We apologize for your inconvenience, but as Mario said, there comes a time- Today in New York City, very, very early this morning, really in the middle of the night, New York City police raided and tore down and cleared out the Occupy Wall Street encampment, that has been at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan for nearly two months.

The raid happened at 1:00 AM roughly, as most of the protesters there were asleep. New York City police officers dressed in riot gear handed out a written notice to the protesters telling them where their personal articles from the encampment could be retrieved, which sounds lovely until you saw what they were doing to the protesters' personal belongings.

There were reports that police used knives to cut up the sturdy military grade tents that were the best hope of surviving winter down there. You can see police here cutting down the protesters' tent poles, with handheld saws, with Sawzalls. This was a massive police action. There were 200 arrests early this morning.

Zuccotti Park was totally cleared. But here's the thing, like at Cal, like everywhere so far for the past couple of months, the protesters are already back. After taking temporary refuge last night in nearby Foley Square, in the immediate aftermath of the police raid, at daybreak, people came back to Zuccotti Park and said that no matter what happened, whatever specific spot they were gonna be boxed out of for the time being, they were not going away.

They were not leaving. I 

mean, on a practical level, what happens now? What's day one? What's day two? 

I'm going to stay here, and I'm gonna put my tent right back up. We show them that we are not just words on an internet screen. We are people, and we are, we are willing to put ourselves in pain and misery to put our point across.

How important is the occupation to Occupy Wall Street? 

I think it's very, important. This is, this is the location, this is the scene of the crime, and we need a, a critical mass of people. When, when people get together and they talk face to face, and they have a library, and people are coming down to talk and organize, and it's, it's, it's, it's what's needed.

you can't do everything on the internet. 

Those interviews are both shot by our producer, Laura Conway, who was down there this morning talking with protesters, and also just talking with the passersby. 

If they can't be here, what do you think happens 

to their movement? Oh, I don't know. I, I

think it ... My gu- Wouldn't you guess it's strong enough that they'll ... that it's gained so much momentum that they'll keep it going somehow? 

It does seem like they are strong enough, at least so far, to keep it going somehow. that same point about the fact that this is not going away was made eloquently, and pretty effectively I think, by Dan Siegel on this program last night.

Dan Siegel, is the advisor to Oakland mayor Jean Quan, who resigned in protest over that city once again clearing out their Occupy encampment. Dan Siegel was our guest on the interview last night. 

To me, it seems like a totally useless and futile activity to spend millions of dollars to take people out of tents, to create situations where there was bloodshed in our streets, and lots of chaos for days, because they're gonna come back.

this is a movement that can't be stopped. 

They're gonna come back. Although he did not put it, in these specific terms, Dan Siegel was essentially recommending last night, that cities consider taking the approach that Washington, D.C. has taken as a city thus far, which is to not try to clear the encampments out of there.

To do what you need to do to protect public safety, but to also recognize that this movement is important. To try to figure out a way to let them stay. Practically speaking, though, and this is just practical advice to every mayor in the country, to every police force in the country, the whole point of this protest is that it doesn't go away.

That's the tactical point. It's not called March on Wall Street. It's not called Rally at Wall Street. It's called Occupy Wall Street. It's not a stand up for the 99% on Saturday at noon movement. It's a we are the 99% movement, and its tactics are about physical presence, about continued physical presence.

And so beating the heck out of people, and knocking down their signs, and arresting them, and tearing down their stuff, and cutting it up with Sawzalls, and running them out of a public space for a day, that makes this movement stronger. And it's always been this way. You kinda should've figured it out by now.

I mean, the reason Mario Savio gave his Bodies on the Gears speech that became so iconic, the reason he gave that speech in December 1964, is because in October 1964, police moved in to try to arrest people for handing out civil rights pamphlets on the Berkeley campus. And those arrests led to this. Look.

Do you see what's in the center of that? It's not a stage. A kid who the police were trying to arrest for handing out civil rights pam- pamphlets is in that police car, which is what's in the middle there. The police car is what Mario Savio is standing on. That's hundreds, no, thousands of other people surrounding the police car, not letting the police take that kid away to be arrested.

That kid was in that car for nearly two days. Had he not been arrested, he would've just been a kid on Sproul Plaza giving out civil rights pamphlets. But because you arrested him, those became, 30 years later, the Mario Savio steps. That plaza became home to Berkeley's Free Speech Monument. It became not just some one kid's free speech effort, it became the Free Speech Movement, which by the way, became a major part of why we got a massive nationwide anti-war movement in this country.

And so in Oakland, on October 25th, 2011, they beat the heck out of people. They fractured the skull of an Iraq War veteran. They doused all of downtown Oakland in tear gas. They set off concussion grenades. And they cleared that plaza that day, and that encampment came back at that plaza bigger than ever.

Now they've cleared it again, as of two nights ago. How did Occupy Oakland respond? They came back. They came back to the original square. They occupied there and also to a nearby one, where they plan to stick it out for even longer. In New York City, they cleared out Zuccotti Park in the early hours of this morning with no warning, while people slept.

Tonight, Occupy Wall Street is back, back to Zuccotti Park. In Boston, remember the footage we showed you a few weeks ago, the Occupy Boston encampment being cleared out? They're back. They are back too, and they're filing legal action today. The ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild trying to secure them a place to stay for the long run.

In Portland, Oregon this weekend, there was a huge show of force against the Occupy Portland encampment. Occupy Portland has responded by calling for a citywide day of action on Sunday. They're claiming more support than they have ever had in the past. At Cal Berkeley, after being beaten by police and cleared out of their protest site, Occupy Cal was back with a full day of protest activities today.

And they are back tonight at the birthplace of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement to hear, outdoors tonight, the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture

First, let's talk about the court ruling itself. there's one line in Judge McIntyre's ruling that is, frankly, it's insane. it i- it is, it is, it is insane. It's crazy. I, I can't believe that it's in it, but here we go. I'm gonna read it to you right now. Here's quote, quoting from the ruling, against Occupy Boston.

Judge McIntyre wrote, "Little in the way of expression is outlawed under the United States Constitution." All right, that starts out good, right? You know, y- you don't want things outlawed. you don't want speech outlawed, right? That starts out good, but it, it gets bad. So, "Little in the way of expression is outlawed under the United States Constitution," but, here's where it gets bad, "but an act which incites a lawful, forceful response is unlikely to pass as expressive speech."

You heard me right. Did, did, did you hear it? I'll read it again in case you missed it. "An act which incites a lawful, forceful response is unlikely to pass as expressive speech." Are you friggin' kidding me? Are you fr- seriously, Judge? Seriously? Do you all understand what she just said? Do you understand what this judge just said?

This judge apparently is happy to leave the right of free speech and assembly up to individual police discretion. That is what, that is what she's essentially saying here. That is what she's saying. According to this judge, according to this judge, if the police forcefully respond to your speech, it is not protected by the First Amendment.

It is up to police discretion. It's up... That, that is what she's saying. That is what this judge is saying. The judge says if... The, the, the judge is saying that the police can decide what and when and if you're allowed to speak at all, essentially. So, so, so, so take... So if the pepper spray, if the... Sorry. If the police, if the police pepper spray you, if the police beat you with batons, if, if they do that, clearly, clearly that speech you were trying to do, that's not protected.

If they pepper spray you, if they arrest you, if they beat you with batons, that speech is not protected because the police stopped you from doing it. Because if it was, if it was protected speech, if it was protected speech, well, then the police wouldn't be beating you. The police wouldn't be arresting you if your speech were protected.

It's up to the police to decide what and when you can speak. You know, a writer, a writer for the Boston Phoenix, in response to, to that exact, to that exact thing, actually, posted a picture of a, of, a statue that I've actually never seen in, in Birmingham, Alabama. It, it's, it's a statue commemorating, a famous civil rights mo- moment and photo.

I'd seen the photo before. the, the statue is actually inspired, by this, this, the famous photo, I'm sure you've probably seen it, it's iconic, where this, this white police officer is literally, sicking a, a dog on a, on a Black protester, in the '60s. you know, it's, it's an amazing statue and an amazing, iconic photo.

so I guess, I guess Judge McIntyre, I guess, Judge McIntyre, what you're saying is that white police officer who, who, you know, there's a, he's, he's sicking a dog on him, so that white police officer who forcibly responded to that civil rights protester by sicking a dog on him, by having a dog attack him, technically, technically that civil rights protester didn't have the First Amendment right to, to march, didn't have the First Amendment right to protest because, because if he did, if he did have that right, then that police officer wouldn't have sicked the dog on him.

It is, it... What? Seriously, what crazy authoritarian mindset does this judge have? It is sickening and frankly shocking that this person is on a friggin' bench. She concluded, she concluded in the ruling that, quote, that, quote The act of occupation, this court has determined as a matter of law, is not speech.

That's what she concluded. Occupations are not speech It's like Bill Hicks said, it's like Bill Hicks said, "You have the freedom to do what we tell you." That's what we have the freedom to do, people. The... Look, there is no way, there is no way that you can look at the Occupy movement and say that it is not political speech.

There's no... Well, I mean, I guess you can. I mean, you can. This crazy-ass judge did it. She just did it. She just did it. She just said it's not speech. She just said occupations aren't speech. But if you do, you are frigging kidding yourself. You are frigging kidding yourself. Occupation, occupations aren't political speech?

They're not political speech? Are you kidding me? I don't know if you saw this, Justice McIntyre. I don't know if you actually saw this, but President Barack Obama just gave an economic speech that frankly was f- full, full of the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street. It was full of the rhetoric of the 99%. It was a fiery economic populist speech.

All right, I'm gonna tell you. Hold on, th- calm down, everybody. I didn't really buy the speech. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be frank with you. I didn't buy Obama's speech. I really didn't believe the speech. I'm just gonna be honest with you. but, but the fact that Obama actually gave that speech, the fact that Obama was forced to give that speech is a victory for the political movement that is Occupy Wall Street, the political movement that is the Occupy movement.

The fact, the fact is, because of Occupy, the President now has to talk about economic inequality. The fact that he, that he, that he's not pitching, still pitching to cut more programs, the fact that he's not talking about austerity, which he was doing, you know, a frigging month ago. That is a victory for the Occupy movement.

But are you seriously telling me, are you seriously telling me that that's not political speech? We influenced the frigging President of the United States of America, and this isn't political speech. Are you out of your frigging mind? And look, you know, look, you know, the, the Obama speech, it was a good speech.

It was a good speech, but Ob- you know, I've never said Obama... I've never been one to say, "God, Obama, the problem with Obama, he just doesn't know how to give a good speech." That's not Obama's problem. The problem is, I just don't believe President Obama anymore. You know? I mean, for right now, right now what it is, it's a shift in rhetoric.

It's a shift in rhetoric. A- a- and, and, and, you know, at the moment, there is no shift in policy. you know, he hasn't, he hasn't outlined, or proposed any, any new policies or any real shift in policies or legislation that would actually benefit the 99%. Yeah, you know, that's, that, that, you know, it's a simple truth.

I mean, if he really, if the President really wanted to get people back on his side and really, you know, wanted to say that he's serious of working for the 99%, I guess he would have ended the speech by, you know, I, I, he, for me, he could have ended the speech by saying, "My fellow Americans, I'm ending the speech today by publicly firing Tim Geithner and Bill Daley, and the prosecutions of Wall Street criminals begins now.

Thank you, good night." I mean, that, that would be, that would be change that I could believe in, frankly, personally. But, but look, you know, it was a good speech. It was a, you know, it was perfectly, perfectly good fiery populist speech. But yeah, a- and but yeah, again, I don't buy it. But look, look, the ... I will say this though.

Is it a good thing that the president is talking about economic inequality instead of talking about austerity? Is that a good thing? You are goddamn right it's a good thing. You are goddamn right. That's not a good thing, that is a great thing. The Occupy movement has shifted, has shifted the political talk that's going on in DC right now.

And even if it's just talk, the fact that the talk has been shifted is a insane victory for the Occupy movement. The fact that the president had to give that speech, and that's what the president's gonna have to campaign on, even if, you know, most likely he doesn't actually live up to the speech, the fact that the speech is being made is actually a really good thing and is a major victory.

You know, he's only talking about it because Occupy made him talk about it. But, but according to the judge, according to the judge, Judge McIntyre, occupations aren't protected speech. This thing that they, these, these protesters just did that made the president give that speech, that's not protected speech.

Again, again, according to the courts, money is speech. Money is speech. Corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money buying and corrupting our political system, but you, you little person, you little person down there, you, you can't put a tent in a park to protest that corruption, to protest that buying of our system.

You can't do that, but they can because, because occupations aren't speech

Occupy Rochester, that's in New York State, has been holding protests outside each, one such home, and also the local Wells Fargo branch, demanding the bank negotiate with its owners. Earlier this week, following public outcry, that family there was given an additional 30 days to work out an agreement.

Occupy Oakland now trying to do the same for 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who fell behind on her mortgage payments after she was diagnosed with cancer. Police there blocking the entrance to her home. Speaking of Occupy Oakland, joining me now, as promised, Scott Olsen, the Iraq War vet whose skull was fractured at an Occupy Oakland rally in late October.

Scott, it's a pleasure to talk to you. I'm glad we can do this. Thanks for your time tonight. 

Howdy, Th- Keith. Glad to be here. 

How are you feeling and, how f- people who saw that interview that you did over the weekend at, Occupy Oakland, how, how am, how fast are you getting better? Let me put it that way.

it, it's difficult to, to say. Every time I run into somebody new who I haven't seen for quite a while, they're sur- sur-tw- sur-twived- Mm-hmm ... how much I'm doing better. every time I check in with my doctors, every time I check in with, anybody, any friends, they see the change faster than I, I do. 

Hmm.

I would imagine that's true. Must be. Is it, do you find it frustrating, or ha- has the, th- the support that you've gotten nationwide actually contributed to this process? Not to have everybody pat themselves on the back, but I mean, has it been of any practical value to you? 

Well, i- it's frustrating at times.

but the support has been such, such a great help to me. just going home and reading a new card. I've s- still got a whole stack to get through. 

Mm. 

And pr- pr- support from vet groups and, like, VFTP or IVAW- Mm-hmm ... has been outstanding, and it's been helping me get way b- way better. 

How, how clear a picture do you have of how much support there is and how much you've come to represent, not just Occupy Oakland, but Occupy in general?

Well, I mean, I, I've got this idea, but it's, it's a bit hard to get my head around Yeah I w- I was out on the streets f- of San Francisco today, and th- three or four people who y- you wouldn't expect to be involved with, politics, you know, they recognized me- Mm ... and they sought me, and it's, it's always a f- surprise to me.

Yeah, I would think so. w- w- what does that mean to you when, when people think of you as part of maybe the essence of Occupy? 

I mean, it, it, it's, it's important to me because, you know, I, I am a part of it. W- we all are, and it's important for us all to be a part of it and, embody those values that, we hold, hold true.

Tell me what the... what, what was it particularly that, that drew you to Occupy Oakland in the first place? 

just the, just really the, the community, involved and the diversity of opinions. You know, everybody you talk to there is going to have a different opinion and, and you can always learn something new from talking- Mm

to g- s- somebody else. 

I don't know if you know this name, Sergeant Shamar Thomas. 

Uh-huh. 

Oh, good. Well, then you know what he did here in New York- Yeah ... and he became famous for it because he stood up to the cops and he said, with, with real vigor, but real politeness towards them, you know, "T- there, there's no excuse for you to behave like this.

This is not a battlefield." He knew battlefields. You know battlefields. Does the degree of militarization of the police at Occupy protests, obviously that had an impact on you personally, but in a broader sense, does it shock you that you're seeing this on the streets of this country? 

I don't know. It's, on, on one hand, it shocks, me a lot.

On the other hand, it, it doesn't because our nation's, peace officers have been militarized- Mm-hmm ... over the past 10 years, to combat terrorism, but they're combating anybody with an opinion. 

b- relative to your opinion and these protests, do you have plans, do you have hopes about resuming participating in some, some regular way?

Or what do you wanna do with this as it goes forward? 

I'm, I'm excited to get b- back involved, and I'm trying to, plan on how, how I can get back involved and be an asset f- to be- the Occupy movement. But, you know, I have to make sure I ta- Yeah ... stay safe. 

Well, you're already an asset. You don't have to worry about, about achieving that.

You were sort of like a practical, in-the-field kind of thing. l- let me sum it up this way. W- what do you want, having been through all that you've been through involved in this, what do you wanna see Occupy achieve long-term, short-term, however, however you wanna put it? 

I mean, really, I just want to see more people, getting involved with real democracy- Mm

to build a, a democratic nation. with that, I think we need to end our wars, all of them, and that'll do our country a great service. 

Next, Section B, RIGGED SYSTEM, RIGGED COVERAGE

Let me show you the income inequality so you get a sense of what we're talking about here when it comes to Occupy Wall Street and so many people in this country, the 99% of us, that are frustrated. So last quarter, we're told that, things went really well. The GDP grew by 2.5%. Everybody was happy. The stock market has started to go up.

what they didn't tell you is that real disposable personal income fell by 1.7%. So the economy is, quote-unquote, getting better, right? But the reality is we're not getting any better. So the money's going somewhere. I'm gonna show you where it's going in a second, but it ain't going to us. Our income is going down.

Stock market must be thrilled, but it's not going to us. Well, in fact, you know, from Think Progress, there's this excellent chart that we got. It says if the US land were divided like US wealth, here's who- how much of it would be owned in terms of, of the land mass, right? 1% would own that much, which is gigantic amount.

9% would own the rest, and then you say, "Hey, at least we get Florida and Texas." For the, for the 90%, the rest of us, right? But as you look at that, it gives you at least some visual sense of how much of the wealth the top 1% or the top 10% have. It is gigantic. So when you look at, how things have gone over the last 30 years, this is what we've been talking about all the time on this show, 'cause this goes to show you how they whittled away at us, right?

And how they redistributed the money to the top. Well, a new study out that shows from the House Budget Committee, and, I'm sorry, it's from the Happentent campaign's new report, Restoring Shared Prosperity, from 1973 to 2009, a typical worker, had his wages go up by $1.23 per hour, okay? Over 36 years.

That is an average of 8.4%. So over 36 years, your hourly wage goes up a little over a buck, 8%. Now, yesterday we showed you a separate report that's a slightly different time range but about the same ballpark. '79 to 2007. For the top 1%, how much did their income go up? 200 and 75%. So your income went up by about a buck an hour, their income went up 275%.

You think that was just a coincidence? You think that that's normal? That doesn't happen in every 30-year time period? If you see from, you know, 1950 to 1980, it's not the case at all. In fact, the bottom 20% had their share of income actually go up in that time period. To us now, it seems like that's, how could that have possibly happened?

Well, because we had a fair tax code. And we, and it was better distributed. Right now, the tax code has the richest people, the millionaires, paying less than we do. How does that make any sense? The richest hedge fund and private equity guys in the country, the guys on Wall Street, are paying 15% on capital gains, dividends, and earned interest, while you're paying a much higher rate.

So they're taking from the middle class and giving to the rich, and then it's not surprising that you wind up getting an 8% increase over 36 years, and they wind up getting a 275% increase in less than 30 years. Now when you ask the rich, by the way, the, and here's something that's interesting. Do you agree with Warren Buffett that your taxes should be raised if you're above, a million dollars?

And these are all people who have income above a million dollars. You'd think, well, they're probably gonna say no, right? I mean, it's their income. W- wrong again, Bob. They say yes, 68% of millionaires saying, "Yeah, you should raise our taxes." When they ask them why, they have a number of reasons. These are just quotes from some of the people that they polled, and this is the Spectrum Group that did this poll.

And they're like, "Honestly, we have the money." One guy says, "I don't really know what else to spend it on. I think that if you took more from me on taxes, I wouldn't decrease my spending at all. It just, you'd be taking a little bit more from my savings." But he's like... Another guy says, "Hey, you know what? look, obviously for my own self-interest, I don't wanna be taxed more, but on the other hand, I really think the country needs it.

So I think the best thing to do is f- for, to increase my taxes so that the go- federal government and the country could be in better shape so that it works for all of us." So who's stopping it, right? Who's, or the guys who are saying, "Hey, you know what? I don't care what a majority of the millionaires think.

I don't care what a majority of the country thinks." And by the way, over 80% of the country says we should tax millionaires more, right? But now they're getting taxed less than us. It's insanity. Anyway, so I think the, so who's stopping all this? Over 80% of the country, over 68% of millionaires. Well, it's the few, that 32% of millionaires and billionaires who say, "Oh, no.

No, I love my money, and I, I'm so greedy that I'm gonna take some of my money and I'm gonna spend it on politicians." Because that 68% who are willing to get taxed more, they don't go and contribute to a senator saying, "Hey, please, can you tax me more?" They just say, "Hey, if you do it, I get it, and in fact, I'm in favor of it," right?

But they don't actively go and do legalized bribery of our politicians. But the super greedy at the top, they go, well, like the Koch brothers, they've got $44 billion, but it's not enough for them. So they go buy every politician they can see. On the Energy Committee, 'cause it affects them the most, 'cause they in the oil business, they bought 27 of the 31 people on that committee in the House.

You mean the guys who want higher taxes go on and paying the guys on the committee, "Hey, please raise my taxes"? No. The, the problem isn't even the greed of those few, millionaires and billionaires we're talking about. The problem is that the system allows them to do legalized bribery. I mean, look, it, I'm not just saying this 'cause we started this, movement and, and this PAC, but it's true.

The reason we started the PAC was because we, we see news like this every single day. Look, Wolf-PAC is, is saying we've got to stop this at the source. If you allow politicians to take money, and unlimited money, from corporations and from, rich donors, you're never gonna be able to stop this. A couple of guys like the Koch brothers are gonna come, and they, for the next election, they're raising over $200 million.

Karl Rove's group is raising $240 million. All they gotta do is grab 10, 20, 100 of the richest and greediest guys in the country, and then the rest of us don't matter at all. We don't have a democracy. Those guys then go and, and, and they give a tremendous amount of money to Mitt Romney, to Rick Perry, and to Barack Obama, and then they say, "You will do our bidding."

They don't give a damn about us and our priorities.

It is the panic of the plutocrats. The oligarchy is terrified about what they are seeing now in the streets of Manhattan and in the streets of cities all over this country. 

Yeah, the Occupy Wall Street movement has blossomed in cities and small towns from coast to coast, from Occupy Boston to Occupy San Diego, with more and more diverse groups joining to protest corporate greed.

You heard Glenn Beck there warning fellow plutocrats they're going to come and drag them out of their homes and kill them. 

Oh, good Lord. 

And now Occupy Wall Street is occupying the State Department. Climate action youth group 350.org organized Occupy the State Department over the weekend, calling on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to deny approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline across the Midwest.

The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline would carry dirty oil from the tar sands of Canada 1,700 miles across the farmland and aquifers of the Midwest, all the way to ports at the Gulf of Mexico. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has warned that if the pipeline is built, allowing full exploitation of the Alberta tar sands, it will be, quote, "Game over for the climate."

And because the protesters are not allowed to use electronic amplification, 350.org founder and climate activist Bill McKibben spoke via the human microphone in front of the State Department to amplify his words for all to hear. 

That's why we can never do anything about global warming. 

That's why we can never do anything about global warming.

Exxon gets in the way. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the 

way. 

Goldman Sachs gets in the way. 

The 

whole fossil fuel industry. The whole fossil fuel industry gets 

in 

the 

way. The protesters did not spare criticism of President Barack Obama either. 

We have to free Obama. Because there's some kind of stunt double there now Because there's some kind of stunt double there now.

You know, it's very funny. Fox News just can't wrap their brain around these protests. They think that this is, Barack Obama leading these protests, and I've seen as many people critical of Obama and the Democrats as I have anything else during this very real grassroots uprising. 

And if it seems like corporate media coverage of Occupy Wall Street is lopsided, how about this?

The corporate media and House Republicans have generated copious coverage on the bankruptcy of solar panel maker Solyndra but aren't interested in newly released State Department emails showing a very cozy relationship between State Department officials and TransCanada's chief lobbyist, who also happens to be a former Hillary Clinton campaign official.

In fact, a new analysis by Media Matters shows that the flood of corporate media coverage of the Solyndra bankruptcy dwarfs coverage of the Iraq war contracting abuses and corruption by a ratio of five to one. But the biggest bombshell, thinkprogress.org reports that the State Department has now admitted that a Houston-based private contractor it hired to conduct the environmental review of the pipeline, saying it was no big deal, was actually recommended by TransCanada, even though that contractor had previously worked on projects for TransCanada.

The contractor calls TransCanada a major client in its marketing materials, and that contractor will likely work on the pipeline if approved, which is a potentially illegal conflict of interest. 

So the Obama-Clinton State Department is teaming up with, corporate cronies here, but the Republicans have no problem in this case because the corporate cronies happen to be working on something the Republicans care about?

Apparently

The American people, are onto the games that Wall Street and Washington are playing. So when they asked, in a recent Pew Research Center study, what percentage of people believe that too much power rests in the hands of large corporations and a few wealthy people in this country, 77% of Americans said absolutely too much power in corporations and the wealthy.

So, the idea that the Republicans are going around saying, "Oh, no, no, no. The American people realize these are job creators." No, the American people realize they've got all the power and they're abusing it. More s- statistics here. 61% of respondents said the US economic system unfairly favors the rich.

Not just they have too much money, but the system unfairly favors the rich. 61%, that is a solid majority. And even 51%, a majority of the country, said that Wall Street hurts the economy more than they help the economy. These are not good numbers for Wall Street. The American people are onto you. And, it's gets worse.

This is actually a, a depressing part of the study. Do you still believe the American dream is possible? Now, whenever the people are asked that, and they've been asked by Pew since 1994 that question, they usually have an answer of like, "Yeah, you know, we got troubles. The economy's in bad shape. The rich have too much power.

But we still believe in the American dream." Well, that's still true. 58% of Americans think that if you work hard, you could make it in America. But we have a new record high for the number of people who say it is just simply not true. 40% of Americans saying the American dream is not possible. No matter how hard you work, the rules are set against you, rigged against you, and you can't make it.

To... I, I actually don't believe that that is true, but it gives you a, an indication of how upset people are, how despondent people are. And, and don't get me wrong, I definitely agree with them. The rules are rigged against them. It's just a matter of can you overcome that, and how can we fix those rules so that the, we get our democracy back?

And then, finally, though, this was an interesting stat. When asked, do you agree with Occupy Wall Street? Now look, 77% of them agree with the central idea of Occupy Wall Street. But when you ask them specifically, do you agree with Occupy Wall Street? It's still a yes, but it's not 77%. 44% say yes, they support Occupy Wall Street.

35% say that they oppose it. Now those are actually pretty good numbers, 44 to 35, much better than the Tea Party numbers, across the country. But given that they agree totally with the central premise of Occupy Wall Street, they should be even higher i- if they do, you know, what that movement represented.

But the part that disturbs me is 29% said that they approve of the way the protests were conducted, but a huge 49% said that they oppose the movement's strategies. Now that bothers me because basically they've bought into the hype of like, "Hey, you know what? I, I get what they're saying, so that's good. But, they shouldn't be doing it this way.

The protesters are so wrong." they, there's hippies and then there's a confrontation with the cops, and Fox News is blaring them and then CNN picks it up and then all other news stations pick it up. Confrontation with the cops as if they're the ones who caused it. They're sitting there doing their First Amendment right.

The cops come in, do the raids, pepper spray, et cetera, and then they get blamed for it. 49% saying they're using the wrong tactics. But what tactics do you want them to use? If they politely said, "Hey, you know what? The rich are screwing you," and they said it in their basement, you wouldn't have heard it. You wouldn't know about the Occupy movement.

There is no polite way of saying this. In fact, they're doing it as polite as possible. It's civil disobedience. It's not even disobedience. They're the ones following the law. They're the ones that are e- exercising their First Amendment rights, just like in the civil rights era. Martin Luther King said, "Hey, look, the courts, the Supreme Court has ruled in our favor.

We do have these rights, whether it's the march, whether it's to insist on our civil rights in the South. It's the local police that are, breaking the law." He was absolutely right about that as well. But of course, you know, in the end, you know, with all this propaganda, I guess some people go, "Well, I don't like the way they're doing it."

Now, don't believe the hype, man. They're doing it in a perfectly acceptable, in a tradition that is deeply American. They're protesting it and bringing attention to it. That's why you found out about it. And, and remember, you totally agree with them, meaning in general, the American people. So I, I, I don't have...

I hardly have any problem with how they're doing it. Of course, this is a giant organization. Some people do the wrong things, but it's not even an organization. But overall, I think the movement has been fantastic, and I think that, you should not only support the movement and the ideas behind it, but also the manner in which they are risking their safety at times and their careers by getting arrested, et cetera, by pushing this fight when you, like...

And so you can sit at home and say, nod your head, and I agree, while they're out doing the fight. If anything, you should be honestly thanking them for that. And then when I was at Zuccotti Park, I was amazed at how tough those guys were. You go sleep on a concrete, in, in New York in the fall when it gets cold, and you do it night after night.

I challenge you to do it one night, let alone for months. So I appreciate their fight, and I appreciate the way that they're doing it. And, and their message is at least absolutely winning across the country.

another one of these stories that was in my little to-do topic file that I found this morning had to do with something-- and it's so recent, by the way, it's still unfolding. So pardon me if this story isn't quite correct by the time you get this show. Here's where it stands now, though.

There was a stock trader, or a guy who purported to be a stock trader, who did an interview, with the BBC the other day, and, apparently some of the BBC people in the studio were shocked by it. But the purported stock trader basically said, and I'm gonna quote him kinda out of context probably, but he basically said that the world economy's gonna go to hell, and no one's gonna fix it, and no one's gonna fix it because none of these countries are really in charge or calling the shots.

Goldman Sachs is in charge and calling the shots, and they don't want this, so it's not gonna happen. Goldman Sachs runs the world. Now, since that time, some have made charges that this guy might be one of, a group of hoaxers and pranksters called the Yes Men. When last I checked on the story, that's being doubted a little bit, but it's still possible.

But if the guy is real, there's some interesting thoughts about that. The first one is trying to figure out if he meant Goldman Sachs, that one specific banking financial entity, or if he means Goldman Sachs and the other entities like them. That wasn't clear. But let's just pretend for the sake of argument that the truth of the matter here is that it's Goldman Sachs alone, and that it doesn't matter what nations do because Goldman Sachs will enforce what they want on these nations, right?

So it doesn't matter what voters in the United States want because the country's government is powerless to enact any change in the rules if Goldman Sachs doesn't want them, right? Goldman Sachs runs the world. That's the truth. Okay. If we all woke up the next morning and believed this, you know, if you walk out the morning that this news breaks and it's, you know, nobody's even denying it, and everybody, left, right, center, intellectuals, people on the street, everybody's talking about it.

I mean, do you walk out your door that morning in your bathrobe and just sort of go out in the middle of the street and gather with your neighbors and say, "What are we gonna do now?" I mean, the thought that popped into my head, I guess since we were thinking 9/11 anyway, was of the people, and I don't want 1,000 emails saying this didn't really happen.

There was no plane. There was a missile. I don't wanna go there, but let's, you know, the story that's so accepted about the one plane that never hit anything but the ground in Pennsylvania that was supposedly rushed by the passengers who, you know, kind of in a suicidal attempt to either take it over or, you know, keep it from hitting its terror target.

You sit there and you wonder at what point those people went from understanding the truth of the situation to acting on it. You know, who stood up first? Who looked at who with some sort of knowing glance? I mean, how did that situation go from concept to action? From realization of what was going on to an attempt to influence what was going on?

To me, that's the interesting crux of the issue. That's the important fault line. How do you cross that threshold? Concept to action. I used to think that all you needed to do was break on through this truth barrier, and the situation would solve itself. But if we woke up tomorrow morning to the news Goldman Sachs runs the world, what are you gonna do about that?

You're gonna have a little lunch and then call your congressman and say, "I don't like the fact that Goldman Sachs runs the world. Do something about that." This is the key. When you start to realize if reality was like A, and A was terrible and worrisome and shocking, what would you do about it? Even if you agreed with all your neighbors, what would you do about it?

One week after we all agree Goldman Sachs runs the world, what's happened? Does the government go and take on Goldman Sachs 'cause enough of us called our congressmen? I mean, this is where I'm starting to get stuck on this idea of, you know, the fault line between truth, acknowledgement of the truth, and then acting on that information.

I don't see the acting coming, and I'm not sure it would come even in the most extreme situations. Namely, you know, the news breaking that we weren't really in charge tomorrow morning Now, this brings me to the protests going on right now over on Wall Street, and several of you emailed me and said, "Dan, you're gonna talk about the Wall Street protests?"

I watched a little of the, of the coverage of these, the small group of people, protesting outside Wall Street, and I tried to read, you know, what they want and their sort of a manifesto kind of idea about how the greed of Wall Street and all that is, is, is steamrolling regular people and all this kind of stuff.

It's, it's an old and, understood sort of critique. There are people in the 1920s who would have understood it, too. And I watched this little protest, and then this morning there was news that some of the other cities of around the country ha- were having, like, sympathy protests and whatnot. But again, tiny little groups of people.

I mean, you go back to the late '60s, and you could get 300,000, 400,000 people at these massive protests that just shook the country, and, you know, you'll get 80 or 100 or 200. I don't know what it is in, in Washington, but part of the problem is when you look at it, you just go, "It's a few people. What's going on there?"

And if you're the guys in Wall Street, for example, if you're Goldman Sachs and you run the world, that doesn't scare you. As a matter of fact, you look at it and you think, maybe that even, maybe that even just makes the whole thing look even that much sillier, right? yeah, show more coverage of those people.

Show how pathetic and small it is and how little they can do and how a bunch of ragtag people chanting slogans, just show that. Great. That'll dissuade any more people coming out. There was one of these, kinds of protests in my own neck of the woods the other day, and I'm passing by the local courthouse, and there's like three people holding signs saying, "We want peace."

And I honked my horn, thinking, "These people have given up their day to go out there and make a statement, and look at just those poor three people." It looks pathetic. It looks like that's all you can muster. Nothing more depressing than that But I thought to myself, what if those Wall Street protesters had company?

What if they made a phone call, and I think they'd probably have to be the ones who made the phone call, to the Tea Party people? And by the way, I do not mean the people that the Koch brothers are backing. I don't mean these people that have been co-opted as an arm of the Republican Party. You may remember when this whole Tea Party thing started, there was a large contingent of people who did not fit our current concept of the Tea Party group, and who quickly sort of dropped away once it was co-opted.

A lot of libertarians in that group, by the way. call those people up and say, "Look, I know we don't agree on much, and I know our concept for what kind of a country we want is different, but the only way we're going to be scary to the people, you know, that we need to scare, and the only way we're going to be a force that politicians and pundits and, you know, the political class needs to pay attention to, is if we, you know, drop the division and start working together."

We can fight about the specifics later. Can we all agree that we're not running the country? I mean, if Goldman Sachs were running the country like that, you know, Wall Street purported, Wall Street guy said, wouldn't you have to make common cause with the rest of the citizens in the country and just say, "Look, we'll fight later.

We can't let Goldman Sachs run the country"? Don't we all think that the country needs to be run by the voters of the country? Is there anybody who doesn't think... Let's just take anyone who thinks that the voters of the country shouldn't be running the show outside the debate. Those people are not on our side.

But anybody who thinks that the voters of the USA should be running the show, that's something that can unite us right there. There's change that could be made on that basis alone if we could just agree on that There are people who keep us divided, folks, on purpose. They do it professionally. Turn on your television.

They have a guy from the right and a guy from the left, or a gal from the right and a g- gal from the left, and they sit there and eviscerate each other. And while they do that, they essentially cast some sort of aspersions upon the whole groups of Americans that think that that person they're talking to is correct.

And we rip another hole in the fabric of the country. We divide the population further at a time when we're all suffering together The doomsday device, you know, for Goldman Sachs if they were running the world would be us all dropping our little differences for now and deciding that we can talk after we get rid of Goldman Sachs.

Unity is the scariest thing to some segments of our society out there, political unity. And I would say it's an actual way to identify the agencies that we the people should be afraid of. They're the ones who would think that unity amongst Tea Party members and Wall Street protesters is the scariest thing that they can think of.

Those people are the ones we need to get a handle on, whoever they are. The big banking company, Citigroup, several years ago, and many of you are already aware of this, put out an interesting internal memo, since pulled from the internet, but there are copies floating around, talking to insiders about how the United States has become what they called a plutonomy.

I thought plutocracy was supposed to be the word, but they called it a plutonomy. And the internal memo was geared towards, you know, how you deal with this new reality if you're Citigroup. You know, how do you invest around it? How do you maximize your returns and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But folks, a plutonomy or a plutocracy obviously means a country ruled by a wealthy class of super, you know, wealthy people.

If that's true, if we live in a plutonomy or a plutocracy, isn't that something that would be just as upsetting to Tea Party protesters as Wall Street protesters? If you woke up this morning and Goldman Sachs were running the place, wouldn't you, you know, need to make common cause with your citizens to fight that reality?

Well, what if it's not Goldman Sachs? What if it's Citigroup's idea of a plutocracy or plutonomy? Don't we have a vested interest in not destroying that? This is where I think a lot of the problem lies, people think we have to smash it if you're one of these Wall Street protesters. You don't have to smash it.

The rich provide the engine that keeps a lot of the, you know, modern rich world going. But they need to be, you know, subject to the control of the citizenry, not the other way around. We don't want to be a country ruled by the rich and powerful. We want to be a country ruled by the people who has a large, functioning, healthy, you know, rich and powerful, you know, segment to it.

Frank Luntz is the top Republican pollster and strategist. and he was at a, a Republican Governor's Association in Florida, and he was telling them what are the different words and phrases that they have to use, and different things that they have to look out for. We now have that information. We have his presentation, and it is awesome.

Now why? First thing he says, quote, "I am so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death." Oh, that's music to my ears. The top Republican strategist is saying he's scared to death of Occupy Wall Street. Why? 'Cause he's polling on it, and the polling is saying, "Oh, the American people like that."

Get a load of this. He says, "They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism. Not only are they succeeding, they get into the core of capitalism." But I'm not even sure I believe that, but they're in a panic here. F- l- listen to the next part of what he says. He says, "Whatever you do, a- avoid these phrases, income inequality and paying your fair share," 'cause it doesn't really resonate with the American people for the other side.

We wanna avoid that 'cause we're the guys who created income inequality, right? So they're like, "Run for the hills when you hear those things. Don't talk about that 'cause it's gonna kill us." then he says about capitalism, quote, "I'm trying to get that word removed, and we're rep- replacing it with either economic freedom or free market."

By the way, when Luntz says it, it's as good as gold. You will now see on your television sets Republicans ad nauseam talking about, quote, economic freedom and free market. Watch for it. It's gonna happen. It's like clockwork. He continues, "The public still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral, and if we're seen as defenders of, quote, Wall Street, end quote, we've got a problem."

And he implies that they've got a problem 'cause that's exactly what they're doing. The whole point of the Republican Party is to protect the top, the rich, the 1%, as he's gonna explain further, a little down here in his presentation. But look at what he's saying. It's b- it's actually bigger than I suspected.

Occupy Wall Street is working so well, and the issue of income inequality is so large in the country that Americans, according to this top Republican strategist, are now beginning to turn against capitalism itself. That's an amazing fact. By the way, something that I'm not even in favor of. I, I like capitalism.

I think we just have to fix the system. There's huge problems with it, but it can be fixed. Now, when he gets to taxing the rich, he's like, "Why in the hell? And run from it. We don't talk about taxing the rich." You know why? 'Cause the American people totally wanna tax the rich. Listen to this quote. "If you talk about raising taxes on the rich, if you talk about, then what happens is the public responds favorably, so don't do that," he says, "But if you talk about government taking the money from hard-working Americans, the public says no.

Taxing, the public will say yes." That is a Republican saying, basically we have lost. The American people want to tax the rich. They want to raise taxes, so stop talking about it. That has been our talking point for the last 30 years. We're gonna cut taxes. Now when we say that, we lose. So now we're gonna change the dialogue and we're gonna talk about economic freedom and how we

And t- that taxes are no longer taxes, but they're taking money not from the rich, but from hardworking Americans. You gotta change the whole language because we've got an annihilation going on here for Republican messaging. This is a huge memo. He says about, the middle class They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers, referring to Democrats.

He says, "We can say we defend the middle class, and the public will say, 'I'm not sure about that.' But defending hardworking taxpayers and Republicans have the advantage." Do you understand the relevance of that? He's saying, "Don't even call them the middle class anymore," 'cause the minute you say middle class, American people think Republicans are against the middle class, Democrats are for the middle class.

I, I, I tell you, man, I have never seen a more relevant secret political memo in my life, thank God it got leaked. This is saying, "We can't even talk about the middle class anymore 'cause it triggers in people's minds that we're against them. We have to switch the word to hardworking Americans," which a- by the way, is also their code word for the rich, which is funny.

He said, "How about government spending?" This is another huge loss for Republicans. He says, quote, "It's not about government spending. It's about waste. That's what makes people angry." In other words, if you say, "Hey, we gotta cut government spending," now the polls are in, and they said, "No, we don't. We don't think that's the problem."

So they have to reframe it in, in terms of waste. By the way, if you really wanna cut waste, you gotta go to the Defense Department. That's where all the waste is, right? Now, of course he wants to avoid that as well. He says, when you're talking to somebody who is an occupier, somebody from Occupy Wall Street.

Now, you would think Republicans, they punch them in the mouth. That's what they normally do, right? He's like, "No. Basically, we've lost, so here's what you have to say instead. First off, here are the three words for you all." He's telling this to Republican governors. "I get it. I get that you're angry. I get that you've seen inequality.

I get that you wanna fix the system." So he's saying, "I acknowledge what you're saying is true, because I've seen the polls, and I can't fight against it. So instead, what I'm gonna have to do is pretend that I'm on your side." So now he gives the governors all the terminology that while they're protecting the rich, they can pretend to be on their side.

So instead of fighting Occupy Wall Street, he says, "Oh, tell them, oh, I get bad e- bad economic intelligence. That's terrible." Now, so what do you, wanna call the rich instead? Because you- there's just no way of defending them if you look at the polls. He says, "Here are the words that you need to change and put in place of rich, basically.

Small business owners, job creators." Now, we've seen that before. They're already using those. Luntz came up with those earlier. But you never call them the rich. You never call them the top bracket. Small business owners, job creators, and then two others have been added to the list. Entrepreneurs and innovators.

Okay, so those are the new code words for the rich, so that of course they c- the Republicans can do their main job, which is to protect the rich. And then when you talk about Wall Street, he's like, "Oh, we're losing on that," right? So- Instead, redirect them to hating, Washington instead. Quote, "You shouldn't be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington."

T- this is what we're gonna suppose tell our advisors. "You should occupy the White House, 'cause it's the policies over the past few years that's been causing this problem." In other words, take your legitimate anger which we can no longer fight, and make sure you misdirect it towards, Democrats and the White House, when in fact, Wall Street's causing the problem.

And i- it's so detailed that he's set, he's got even guidelines for how to help, protect the bonuses of the Wall Street fat cats. You shouldn't call them bonuses anymore. You should call them pay for performance, 'cause that polls better. This memo is gold. It is basically an admission that Republicans are completely for the rich.

It's an outline of how they can protect the rich by using chicanery and a cr- a interesting and different terminology. And number three, most importantly, for the first time you've got the biggest Republican pollster and strategist saying, "No mas, we've lost on policy. We have to do a complete redirection on language, otherwise we're gonna get hammered, including saying that we're totally with Occupy Wall Street, and we get the economic inequality."

I did not expect this victory to be this complete. I'm startled by that. Now understand, the politicians have not reacted to it yet. So you're not seeing that victory yet on your television screens. You're not seeing it, in the media. You're not even seeing it from the Republican, talking heads yet, right?

But Luntz is the first person to do it. He's the one that sets the, gets the snowball rolling. They have, they're just getting these memos. They're just getting these polls. So now you'll probably begin to see that new direction for the Republicans, which of course, as the memo outlines, is a, another misdirection to get to their ultimate objective, which is to protect the rich.

that's amazing, man. You know what it shows you? There is a brewing non-anger rage in the country about this inequality, about how the system's been fixed by the Wall Street guys and the top 1%, the American people get it no matter how much Washington and the media try to cover it up.

Aside from being bad, she also seems to be, well, I don't know. I guess the jury's out. She's either an idiot or just a huge liar And I'm gonna go with, well, this also could be just, you know, a, a enormously lazy and, too self-satisfied. It's probably a combination of all three. I'm not sure if we see all three in this clip, but, let's play this clip.

This is Erin Burnett. This is just a day, day and a half ago, I guess. I've completely lost sense of time. Erin Burnett heading down to occupy Wall Street. she's shocked. Like, "Look, we were down there. The, we saw this guy," who's in this clip, actually. He was hanging out when we were i-interviewing Naomi Klein.

He was probably standing a foot from Naomi Klein, listening in to our show- 

Yeah ... 

live. 

Yes. And, are there people there who look a little freaky or wearing funny glasses or ha... Yes. And I would say the percentage of those people relative to the insi- tire size of the crowd is somewhere between one and 3%.

there's a lot of people there who look frankly like, like you, Matt 

Are you saying I'm one of those freaky looking people? 

No, I'm saying that, you look like somebody who maybe doesn't, who hasn't been out and hasn't taken a shower in a couple days. 

Thank you. 

You can say that. It's a fact. No, it's just like, you know, there might be- I took pride in that

kids who, you know, wear an, you know, a hoodie because that's what they, you know. And, so here is Erin Burnett doing this serious report. She goes down there and she, she really fakes out this, ad sales guy or this, for-marketing guy or software, computer software developer. But, let's listen to this clip

seriously? The Occupy Wall Street protest entered its third week today. What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters, and it's spread to other cities. But what are they protesting? Nobody seems to know. So this afternoon, we went to Wall Street- Stop

to find out. And this- 

Nobody s- three weeks into this, she's saying, "And nobody seems to know"? When was this? This is two days ago, right? 

Yes. 

And she's claiming that nobo- nobody seems to know.

She has a very, she apparently, has either a very limited social and news circle. You know, Mitch McConnell said, like, "Some people think they have an idea, or there's some places where he said, "But nobody seems to know." Nobody, three weeks into it. That's stunning. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who could actually say, "Nobody seems to know anymore."

You know, Mitch McConnell three weeks ago. 

I mean, even that bank CEO who told Andrew Ross Sorkin to get down there seemed to have a better grasp of what was going on than- 

Yeah ... 

the 

president. Good point. That's a very good point. Maybe she should, get Andrew's, Ross Sorkin's, you know, Rolodex and call that bank CEO to ask him.

All right, let's keep playing. 

But what you heard is what I saw. It's not just a bunch of dancing hippies protesting. There are all kinds of people there. Babies, teachers, cheerleaders, Uncle Sampta and... that. 

Well- Obviously, 

it's an- 

That. She was talking about him being intimately, if you're not seeing the picture, but aside from that, she, yeah, see, those are the rhetorical games she plays here.

It's not just a bunch of hippies. There's also a bunch of other freaks and teachers Right? There's cheerleaders in there that and the, and teachers. So it's not just hippies, folks. I don't I don't want you to think I'm judging. It's not just hippies. There's also a bunch of freaks and teachers 

expect. But they were happy to take some time from their books, banjos, bongos, sports drinks, catered lunch.

Yeah, there was catered lunch, designer yoga clothing- 

Closet ... 

at- 

Oh my God, not catered lunch. You mean people have to eat? Oh, there's a catered lunch as opposed to what? It's not a home-cooked meal that they're doing in the park. Yeah, I mean, there's no Bunsen burners there. No, they bought pizza from across the street, or people sent them pizza.

It's not catered lunch. It's, this is stunning. Keep going. 

Also, I like how she says banjos like this, banjos, like she has no idea how to say the word. 

Right. Weird instrument. 

Absolutely lemon love-up. Computers, lots of MacBooks and phones to help us get to the bottom of it. This is Unplugged software developer Dan.

What do you do for a living? 

I'm a software developer. Software 

developer. Yes. So currently employed or unemployed? Unemployed. 

Unemployed. Unemployed we like to call it. 

Unemployed. 

It's called Occupy Wall Street. 

So do you know that, taxpayers actually made money on the Wall Street bailout? 

I was not aware of that.

They did. They made... Not on GM. Okay. But they did on the, on the Wall Street part of the bailout. Okay. Does that make you feel any differently? 

Well, I would have to do more research about it, but, 

If I were right, it might. 

Oh, sure. 

Pause it All right. Th- this person is, and, and this is where obviously she's just lying or she's just stupid.

and, and I would imagine, a- and these things aren't mutually exclusive, to be fair. She could be lying and she could be stupid. she could be willfully ignorant. but she really wanted to go down there and, and prove how, how clueless these people were. There's no reason to be mad at Wall Street.

Now, GM on the other hand, you can be mad at GM But not Wall Street. which I gotta say is fairly con- coincidental because, here's a statement, by way of, Will Bunch and Bryan Hickey of the local Independence Tea Party And what they have to say about Occupy Wall Street. Because the implication here that she's saying is that bailing out the wa- all of the, the banks was a great idea, but GM, eh, they didn't make any money on that, but Wonder where she got that concept from?

Wonder where she got that sort of like, That, I don't know if I will call it a talking point, the idea that Wall Street is the root of all evil is also an anathema to us. Like any other institution, Wall Street has its corrupt figures and such individuals should be dealt with accordingly. But to condemn Wall Street en masse is akin to condemning our entire free enterprise system.

Our association deplores corporate bailouts. GM. They're talking about GM. Hmm. Corporate subsidies, Solyndra, and corporate welfare. Now, of course, we know that Solyndra and any solar subsidies are literally 2% of all the subsidies we give to, energy, whether it's, 50 billion for nuclear, power, for, another, 10, 20 billion for, coal, and another 10, 20 billion for oil subsidies, but it's the $500,000 loan or the, $1.5 million loan to Solyndra that was the big problem.

At the same time, however, we recognize the contributions and achievements of America's Chamber of Commerce. the... She's parroting, the, talking points of these, Tea Party people. I guess that's not to be surprised, but, to... But, let- let's keep playing this, this video

Seriously? That's all it would take to put an end to the unrest. Well, as promised, we did go double check the numbers on the bank bailout, and this is what we found. Yes, the bank bailouts made money for American taxpayers. Right now to the tune of $10 billion, anticipated that it will be $20 billion. Those are seriously the numbers.

And this was a big issue, so we solved it. In fact, the only reason we haven't made all of our money back is actually GM. But I don't see protests in Detroit. It- 

So there it is. and GM probably where I think we're going to see, the money. In fact, I think if you look at market capitalization, we probably have made money.

We just haven't sold all the stock in there, but that's aside from the point, because she conflates bank bailouts with TARP Yes, TARP was one element of the bank bailouts,

we also know the billions of dollars that was spent, to AIG was basically a slush fund for other, banks, particularly Goldman Sachs. We also know that we allowed the Bank of America to sell a bunch of their crappy, mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

So there's anywhere, I mean, the figures range from anywhere from like 1.5 to 3 trillion dollars that have been spent on these bank bailouts

So the notion that it didn't cost any taxpayers any money is ridiculous, but that's not even relevant anyways. Because even if the bailouts cost no money, even if we made $10 billion on the bailouts, we still have a completely broken financial system because of the excessive leveraging and speculation these banks did, and it has destroyed the economy

There are, depending on how you calculate it, over 20 million people unemployed

There are millions of people whose mortgages are, underwater. There are millions of people who have been subjected to mortgage fraud. There is ongoing mortgage fraud So forget about the bailouts

Wall Street ruined our economy ruined our economy. The financialization of our economy is ruining our economy The income disparity is ruining our economy But Erin Burnett found it more convenient to just reduce it down to, "Do we make money on TARP?"

I think there are two things. Two things as, two reasons why, the, the Occupy Wall Street protests continue to draw attention and, excitement and enthusiasm. As opposed to, you know, couple months ago, you had the 100,000, union people in, in DC protesting, bigger numbers. But the two main reasons are, one, you have a, a, a group of people who are, like I've said before, showing such intense commitment And doing it for a sustained period of time And then number two is because of Tony Bologna, that cop who sprayed those women with pepper spray, sort of demanded the attention of the mainstream media.

Now, I do think that, it would have happened eventually if these people stuck it out in group. But, those two factors are, well, really pushed it over the edge. So, here is lonely Tony Bologna And, let me just read, David Benjo is, "As flaming liberals who wanna put every hood on the couch, we decided to investigate the psychosexual angst of Deputy Inspector Bologna.

And the results aren't pretty, featuring the vocal debut of Mike DiSesa, who despite his Frenchy n- name, is as Italian as Sophia Loren and Mussolini driving a Ferrari full of meatballs into the Sistine Chapel." Written mostly by Paula Carino and Mike. So you see what, Benjo is doing here. He's trying to show the Italian bona fides of the creators of this song.

So get ready for this. I figure there must be a couple Italians in Worcester. but in case Matt... Massachusetts, you know, the number one, ethnic background is in Massachusetts. 

What's that? 

I know you think Irish, right? 

That's what I would think, 

yeah. It's Italians. 

Wow. 

I figure there must be a couple Italians in Worcester, but in case Matt comes from real America, brocioli is a kind of sausage.

Mortadella, another kind of sausage. Sausage of death. Pancetta is ham. Stinadi means stupid. Fungola is a bad word. And here it is, ladies and gentlemen, Lonely Tony Bologna.

The crazy moon over Wall Street brings a tear to my eye

Mama, why these American girls, they gotta fuss and cry when they march and get out of line, raising their hands

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do and bust out his mortadella. Shut up with your First Amendment or it's no more Mr. Nicey. I sprinkle on the peppercorns, I like my dishes spicy. We're the NY Bungalo PD if you wanna know who we are. This baloney has a last name, it's M-A-C-E-R. We'd hate to see you hurt yourself, so before you lose control, we'll roll you up in a plastic mat and we make a nice braciole.

Ah. Now, everyone's mad and they got a big vendetta

They call me a pig, an officer pancetta. I gave these ladies the business back in 2004

Mama, don't nobody respect the law no more. I took a vow to protect and serve you spinotti sons and daughters. Don't they understand I'm just maintaining law and order? You're stealing my heart, I spray the mace. A handy device to shut up your face. Tell you little heartbreakers, learn in your place. What are you gonna do, make a federal case?

We're the NY Funkadelic PD if you wanna know who we are. This baloney has a last name, it's P-N-C-E-R. We'd hate to see you hurt yourself, so before you lose control. We roll you up in a plastic net and we make a nice patrol. Hey! 

Unbelievable They just outdo themselves every week I was just gonna say Every week Every week 

they 

kick it up a notch.

And not only

Crap is going crazy. For the record, by the way, I do come from, real America and real America is Queens, New York. 

Yeah. i- it is, it is, is stunning. I mean, the, the, the, i- on, on so many levels, these guys are, it's just unbelievable. It's just unbelievable

Now, Section C, WHAT THE MOVEMENT WAS DOING

So we at Planet Money, we're economics reporters, so we immediately started to wonder, they want all of society run on this basis where lots of groups, where everyone's equal, gets together and just as a group decides what they want? Could that work? And, and how would that work? Like, just in the pragmatic stuff of, like, getting people the things they want and figuring out what to do with food and clothes and, you know, just the, the basic structure of an economy.

So it turns out we found this economist who has been working on this problem for 40 years. We caught him when he was on his way to Occupy Portland, where he- On 

his bicycle ... 

on his bicycle. And he said that, yes, for 40 years he's been crafting this proposal for exactly this vision of society. His name's Robin Hahnel.

I call myself a libertarian socialist. Wait, wait, wait. To say those words- I gotta interrupt 

you. Yeah, that's... I literally think of those as, as, as opposites. You know, the, the- 

That's right. if you call yourself a libertarian socialist in the United States, they think, "Oh, you're like Ron Paul," or, you know, Hayek, or they think, "Oh, you're a socialist," and that means Soviet socialist.

So it's... I, I always hesitate to say that's what I am, but I believe that is an accurate way I can describe myself. 

Robin Hahnel teaches economics at Portland State University, but earlier in his academic life, he was a math major, and that helped me understand where his whole theory came from. He basically started pondering a puzzle.

In the waning days of the Soviet Union when, when people like him, left-wing progressives, you know, really soured on the Soviet model, they were stuck with this problem. Wait, we don't like American-style capitalism, and we don't like Soviet or Chinese-style communism. So what could we do? Could we create an economic system that was more democratic than capitalism and more democratic than, than communism as it's practiced now?

And what he came up with is called participatory economics, and it works a lot like the way the general assemblies at Occupy Wall Street are structured. So first of all, there's no owners, there's no managers. Everyone is equal, and people gather in working groups to do business. 

The easiest way to picture it for me is, is a factory.

So you're a shoe factory. All the workers in the shoe factory gather and decide how we're gonna run our shoe factory. One committee might come up with a proposal of what kinds of shoes we're gonna make and, and which styles and how many. Another committee would create a proposal for how we're all gonna be compensated.

So he said some might decide everyone makes exactly the same amount, but he imagines a lot of worker groups will decide, "No, if you work harder, you deserve more stuff." 

The harder you work, the, the more you make, and it's not your boss deciding, it's your colleagues 

And basically, they simply have to do what is a very difficult job and sometimes contentious.

They have to essentially review one another's performance and decide, has somebody worked harder? You know, has somebody put in more effort? Has somebody made greater sacrifices than somebody else? And if so, then they are awarded, you know, by their coworkers. 

Robin recommended we, we skim pretty quickly over, over the next step.

He spelled it out in several books, but basically, there's this other process for how all the different working groups all over the region or all over the country that want a little more leather or want a little more rubber. There's sort of a central processing system that uses, as he says, a very simple computer algorithm he's come up with, which he says can determine supply and demand issues very efficiently without using what we in capitalism use, a, a price signal, where you just...

If you want more leather, you just find out what the price is, and if lots of people want leather, the price goes up and you maybe substitute something else. The other thing the price signal does is it turns on a dime. You know, if, if there's a disastrous frost destroying lots of orange crops in Florida, suddenly oranges are more expensive immediately all over the country.

And we asked him how his system would respond to sudden shocks since his system requires people to mail these proposals in from all over the country. 

It may be the case that one of the things that this system has a great-- has more difficulty in doing is making on-the-fly adjustments because it's more participatory.

We may discover that in the real world when this system is implemented, that that is a place where it perhaps is a little weaker than some other systems that have gone before it. I'm, I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that perhaps there's gonna be some disadvantages to doing things this way as well as some tremendous advantages.

Another issue that we wanted to ask Hahnel about was, what about us, the, the consumers? You know, how do we buy stuff? There's basically not really money in his world, at least the way we use money. So the way you purchase, you have to decide a year in advance what you're gonna consume. So your neighborhood gets together, you have another meeting.

You submit a plan to a consumption council of what you guys all wanna consume over the next year. So you decide how much toilet paper you're gonna need, how many pillows or T-shirts and iPods and iPads, and your neighborhood consumption council sends its request to this centralized computer algorithm.

Which is a very big difference from how we live today. I mean, I, I have no idea how many potatoes or eggs I'm gonna want next August, say. This year would've been really hard for me because, you know, in January I had no idea I was gonna be having a kid at the end of the year, but I am. 

Oh, Adam, you're kidding.

Congra- That's the first I've heard of this. Congratulations. 

She's kidding because Zoe, like the Amazon corporation, know that my consumption patterns have changed rather dramatically in the last few weeks as I'm buying all this baby stuff. And I asked Hahnel about that. How does his system account for changes in what we want?

How is that gonna play out? Well, when you go through the checkout line of your neighborhood distribution center or stores or whatever, they're basically gonna... They're gonna keep tra-- They know what your approved consumption request for the year was. They know what you asked for. It's in their computer, and they're gonna basically start giving you little tips.

You know, at this rate, you know, you're not gonna be consuming as much of this as you asked for. At this rate, you're taking a lot of stuff you never asked for. 

another thing I gotta say that I thought a lot about listening to Hahnel is, my God, this sounds like a lot of meetings. I feel like I have structured my life around avoiding meetings as much as possible.

And he said, "Are you kidding? I'm an academic. I have been invited to lots of really awful, boring meetings." 

I can't stand meetings 

Then why'd 

you create an economics 

built on meetings? 

I 

can't stand the- Yeah. If the decisions I care about are gonna be made at the meetings that I'm, that I'm going to, then I think there's a lot more incentive for people to go to meetings.

He's saying if people feel like their voice will be actually heard, then they'll be more into meetings. But if you really just can't get down with meetings, then you don't have to show up to make your voice heard. It's participatory, not mandatory. 

Although he says if you don't participate, there's a good chance you're not gonna like the outcome.

Now, obviously there are a lot of things that people would object to here, but Robin Hahnel has sort of a sales pitch to the Occupy Wall Streeters. He says to them, "You know what? You're brand new at this, and that's fabulous, and you're bringing energy that my generation has long since lost. But keep in mind, people like me, h- we've been thinking about this for a very long time, and we've thought through some of the issues that you're gonna come up with as you're pursuing this participatory democracy model of society."

But Hahnel says in no way does he hope that his generation, the older guys, take over this movement. He says he is so excited about what's going on right now. 'Cause f- for him, like a real radical leftist, it's been a pretty lousy 20 years. You know, except for those anti-globalization skirmishes in Seattle in the late '90s, there just has not been a lot in our culture to, to really appeal to someone like him.

So this is a very exciting moment for a guy like that. 

Ever since this crisis hit, I've been wondering, "Is there gonna be a progressive, a looking forward wake-up call here in America?" And I'm a lifelong leftist, and- I remember tears came to my eyes when I was at the Battle of Seattle because I didn't know whether I would ever see that kind of demonstration again in my country.

I feel that way about this. 

Now, we should tell the folks at the general assembly who, who don't already know, Robin Hahnel's model, he calls it participatory economics or parecon, is just one of the models of an economics built on this small group democracy idea. We found out there are a ton of them.

There's something called mutualism, analytical Marxism. There are dozens of different named forms of 

anarchism. Horizontalism, syndicalism, post-autistic economics. That's a thing. Transformative economics. 

We could go on, and each of these has its own approaches, its own policies and structures, although they all broadly follow this model of participatory decision-making.

If they could actually create a society based on participatory democracy on that level, it would be among the most radical changes ever contemplated for America. And it's tough because before you change America, you need to get four hundred people in a park to agree on precisely how you wanna change America.

So they're meeting every night for several hours. One guy, who said he didn't speak for everybody- Of course ... proposed a timeline that they will have a consensus view with a complete platform by November twentieth. 

let me, let me read this, the, one of the, the, the final paragraphs to your piece 'cause I think it's, i- it's, it's prescriptive and, in some ways it's, it was, prophetic. "What is needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the one percenter. A new civic space in which he's openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at every turning.

What is needed is a revival of the language of vigorous old progressivism, where in the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new resistance. We face, as Hessel describes, a system of social control that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, that trumpets contempt for the least powerful in society, that offers only outrageous competition of aga- all against all.

To create is to resist," writes Hessel. "To resist is to create." And then your final paragraph, "Such creativity, alas, is unlikely in New York." and you go on to say, "The city is regressing. This sparks no protest from its people." And, literally, I think as you, probably sent this in to, Orion Magazine or maybe a couple weeks before, after you sent it in, we get, Occupy Wall Street, 

Yeah.

I even wrote a, 

Well listen, you know, you say it's a huge piece. and, the only thing, that I think is inaccurate, and may have been, u- unpredictable was that last paragraph where, you thought it would be unlikely to see this rise up. What, what do you think? what accounts for that? I mean, both, your, lack of optimism to see any type of revolt and the fact that w- we are seeing now, at least to, to some degree, a, a, a growing and, aggressive and strong, rebel, rebellion against this.

Yeah. Well, like I said, you know, I wrote the first... I completed the first draft of that article with, with more left, that kind of dark and rather despairing ending. I completed it, you know, more, almost a year ago. So, you know, it's, it, man, I mean, you see New York, you see what New York is all about.

You know, we've got a lot of, a lot of young people here who are just obsessed with, with playing the game, with serving the corporate master, with making money, with being, you know, being, being the, the, you know, getting the big bucks and, and, and being part of, of the system, if you will. And so, you know, New York is not, today New York is not, in, or at least as I, you know, as a New Yorker, until, until the, the eruption of Zuccotti Park, New York was not a place that w- was inspiring in terms of, alternative cultures or, or of, of, inspiring for, for people to, to rise up and establish themselves against, against the corporatocracy.

You know, this kind of, I mean, this town is run by corporatocracy. It's owned by corporatocracy. It's, its very nature is corporatocracy. So there you go. 

In your piece, you get into the, the history of, essentially the, the last great, I guess, populist movement, that took place, that, that essentially grew, I guess, in the, in the late '80s.

just, walk us through some of that history, because I think, you use it as an example, you know, a, a call to arms at that time and as sort of a paradigm from which, people could follow. 

Right. No, we're talking about the 1880s here. 

Exactly. 

yeah. The, in, there's a section in the article in which I, I discuss the, the candidacy for mayor of a guy named Henry George.

And Henry George was a, you know, he was a visionary. He, he felt that, capitalism, that the real problem with capitalism was that, you know, we had, we had given to those who did not do their fair share of, work, we'd given to them all sorts of outrageous remuneration and, in particular, he looked at, those people who owned a lot of land and speculated on the land and could, and could make, what he called economic rent.

and, you know, he basically said, "All right, we've got a lot of rentier, rentiers in our society, people making money without doing productive labor. So how do you fix this?" Well, you, you, you change the laws so that you get rid of the rentiers, and so that people have to actually work for a living. Now, today in New York, and one of the great crises that we face in our society is that we in the United States are top-heavy with rentiers, and rentiers being the finance class.

The finance class who apparently do nothing. They are socially useless, as, as a great piece in the, the New Yorker concluded, a piece by John Cassidy. They, they don't do anything, and yet they get paid enormous sums of money, and they suck away enormous, sums from society, and they draw off incredible amounts of economic rent.

So, in the Orion piece, I drew this parallel back to, back to Henry George in the 1880s, in which, you know, he, he basically is running for mayor. He drew, a, a enormous, wide-ranging ecumenical following of, you know, of lower class, middle class people, of, of all races, and professions, who basically said, "No, we no longer want to be ruled by the rentiers, by what, what, you know, what pro- progressives back then called the parasites.

The parasites are running things today. The parasitic class, the hedge funder, the financier, the Wall Streeter, the one percenter, they are running things. And, I mean, you know, I think it's, it's high time too that, that, you know, the progressive movement today embrace that old muscular language of progressivism that a guy like Henry George back in the 1880s used, you know, talking about the, the hedge funder and the Wall Streeter as a parasite, because these are parasites.

They're, they're blood-sucking vampires. They're ticks fattening themselves on the, on society. And, something has to be done, man. 

And, in, in the follow-up piece that you had, to the reign of the one percenters in a, in a, in a brief, post on, on Orion, you, you talk, more about the, the pop- populist movement, of the 1890s.

tell us about the, the populists, and, what they, what they, they basically carried that, that message, but they, they, they, they transfer that message into pol- to not just, a protest, but into political power. 

Right. Now, you know, Henry George could be considered one of the first populists, but it wasn't until the rise of the People's Party of 1892, which became known as the Populist Party, that you really had a nationwide movement that demanded- a, it, it demanded a transformation of law in favor of the working men, what were then called the productive classes, against the parasite classes.

now the, the populace, you know, arose out of the, it was an agrarian movement. It was a movement of farmers from the Midwest who basically said that they no longer wanted to be exploited by, monopoly bankers and, railroad owners who were controlling, railroad transport rates and controlling the systems of credit.

and impoverishing these productive classes, these farmers, who could not survive in the marketplace. So, you know, they, they envisioned all sorts of things that, that, that required decades, gen- a whole generation, two generations to be realized. Now, they, they, a minimum wage, an eight-hour day.

they wanted to nationalize the railroads, nationalize the telegraph services. They wanted to create a, they wanted to create a, a bank, a people's bank that would regulate money on behalf of the public interest. They wanted to, they wanted to create all sorts of social security protections. Now, a good number of these populist ideas first floated in the 1890s were later put into effect by FDR in, nine, in 1934 and thereafter.

So the populist sub... The, the, the comparison that can be drawn today to the, the Occupy Wall Street movement is it, it may take 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years for a movement to actually affect real change in this country. It may be a multi-generational affair, just as it was a multi-generational affair with the populists arising in the 1890s, but not seeing their platform fully, you know, partially implemented, until the 1930s.

When police dragged a family's belongings into the street, quote, "Some of us would kick ash cans and create a general ruckus. This would divert the marshal, and others of us would help the families put the furniture back up. It was a war of attrition." Another account from the same timeframe, same town, quote, "We formed a squad.

Someone would come in and say somebody was put out on the street, and so we would call this one, call that one, and say, 'How would you like to go help these people?' We did that, boys, girls, elderly men, young men, whoever. You just called somebody and said, 'Hey, let's put the furniture back in.'" We talk about the Great Depression, not our own Great Recession, but the Great Depression of our grandparents and our great-grandparents' day.

We tend to talk about hobos and Hoover- Hoovervilles, people kicked out of their ordinary lives and roaming the countryside looking for work, lining up at soup kitchens or setting up camp in shacks made out of whatever spare wood or cast-off tin they could find. In towns, they called Hooverville after President Herbert Hoover, and it was not meant to be a compliment.

But Americans who lived through the Great Depression did not necessarily move out of their houses or apartments quietly just because the landlord showed up and said they had to go. Some of them, a lot of them, it turns out, stood their ground with help from their neighbors. The Americans of the Great Depression organized what became known as eviction defense, like the people putting the furniture back in I just quoted a moment ago from Brooklyn.

Sometimes eviction resistance turned into eviction riots. They rioted in Chicago in August 1931. At least three protesters were killed there after 60,000 people marched against evictions. They rioted in the Bronx in 1932 after families went on rent strike over prices they could no longer afford. They rioted in Cleveland after a bank foreclosed on John and Sophie Sperenga, and the county sheriff kicked them out with their four children.

In Cleveland, the local Small Home and Landowners Federation spread the alarm up and down the neighborhood streets. Thousands of people showed up, thousands of people to defend the Sperenga family. Quote, "As police arrived, they were greeted by taunts, jeers, and volleys of rocks, bricks, sticks, and even kitchen utensils.

The officers responded with nightsticks, tear gas, and fire hoses." Reporter James Steele filed this account in The Nation in 1933. Quote, "This is a crowd that won't scatter, a crowd that is strangely grim and determined." They were determined to defend that family in 1933, the depth of the Great Depression.

Now Cleveland is defending families again in Cleveland in 2011, not by throwing bricks and sticks and soup ladles, but by doing this. In Cleveland, they are pitching tents in the yards of a single mother with two kids and the sheriff on the way. If you're coming for her, you're coming for us. That's been the message from Occupy Cleveland.

They have been wonderful actually, keeping me company last, since last night when they started piling in and, helping me get the place cleaned up a little more and organized so I can pack. 

You know, a lot of the people you've probably heard on the news have sort of been asking what the Occupy, whatever city you want to put in, they, they don't really know what they stand for.

Has this told you? How has this told you more about what 

they stand for? They stand up for the little guy

Definitely. This is Main Street.

Wall Street can take care of itself. Main Street needs everybody

They came and offered their help. What did you think? 

I thought, "Hey, it sounds like a crazy harebrained scheme. Let's try it. What the heck?" I don't have anything more to lose. 

Occupy Elizabeth Summerer's backyard in Cleveland seems to have had an effect. She got a 30-day stay on her eviction, enough time to work out a deal with the bank or maybe a plan B, enough time that she and her kids didn't have to see their stuff hauled out into the street.

Main Street turned out for her. Just months into the Great Recession, this nation bailed out the banks, an olly, olly, all come free, no rules financial sector had turned people's houses or mortgages into casino chips, which Wall Street made a ton of money trading amongst themselves before the whole thing blew up.

Wall Street blew up, which blew up the whole economy. Millions of Americans were left without jobs and with these con artist mortgages that they couldn't pay. The banks, they got bailed out, but the people did not. If you're broke, just ask Elizabeth Summerer, if you're broke, there is very little help. In October alone, there were hundreds of thousands of foreclosures in this country, the banks seizing people's homes and throwing them out into the street.

This conflagration in the economy started in 2008, but the foreclosure rate in this country is still rising. Technically, the Great Recession may not even be a recession anymore, but families are still having their possessions dragged to the curb. Good luck, and right this way to the homeless shelter. Is that kind of treatment worth defending against?

Is it worth coming to the defense of your neighbors now in 2011, just as people thought it was in 1931 and 1932 and 1933 and on and on? That's becoming the question now among the evolving 99% movement around the country. Ask the family in Atlanta where the Occupy Atlanta protesters intervened in an eviction last month.

Occupy Atlanta got kicked out of its downtown encampment, so they decided that instead they'd move to try to save a police officer's home. Ask the family in Rochester, New York, which almost lost their home to a foreclosure mill, to the foreclosure mill, incidentally, where the employees dressed up as families being kicked out of their homes as their costumes for the company Halloween party last year.

That firm was trying to move in on a Rochester family to kick them out of their home before a group of experienced eviction defenders and new occupiers showed up to help them hold their ground. Ask the families in Minneapolis, where occupiers have shown up with a bullhorn and tents and taken direct action.

Occupy has really made that leap and said, it's time for us to mobilize actions off of the plaza- Mm-hmm ... and really enter Main Street in really a dramatic way. Mm-hmm. And so this is the first time that they've, they've said, "You know, let's address real problems that real people are dealing with and see if we can help be a, a part of the solution."

As fall set in, protesters from Occupy Wall Street around the country, particularly around the colder parts of the country, the 99 Percenters wondered if they could make it through the winter with maybe Quonset huts or cold weather survival gear. Then they wondered where they would go, how they would continue to occupy if police departments kept driving them away from public squares.

Did occupying, showing up, and staying put in a public space, was that fundamental to the ongoing effectiveness of the movement? And if it is fundamental, then how would they be able to keep occupying and where? It turns out maybe that the next incarnation of Occupy was already taking hold with the foreclosure defenses in Atlanta and Cleveland and Minneapolis and Rochester.

Justin Elliott reporting at salon.com this week that a new campaign, Occupy Our Homes, kicks off on Tuesday with protesters in 20 cities. The 99 Percenters say they will show up at foreclosure auctions and at homes that are at risk of foreclosure. Folks who have not yet been part of resisting an eviction peacefully will get a chance to see how it's done.

They will learn from people who've already done it and then teach other people to do it, too. They're asking people to sign a pledge that says, quote, "I will resist any attempt by the bank to take my home. If they come to foreclose, I will not go." This Occupy Wall Street movement is now truly a movement to occupy everywhere.

It is not going away. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the coming of winter and the crackdowns from the police around the country have forced this movement into a new evolution. as, as, as Scott Olsen, the Marine who had his skull fractured at Occupy Oakland, said on this show last night, the movement is evolving.

The movement is adapting, and that's a good thing. If the reports we track every day from the movement itself and local press reports are any indication, this movement is spreading, too, geographically spreading in occupations small and fluid and seemingly too adaptable and too numerous for anybody to shut down altogether.

As of this upcoming week, there appears to be a concerted effort to move it into the neighborhoods where you can see it, where the crisis really lives still. We spend a lot of time on this show covering politics of the electoral variety. This is politics, too. This is the real deal.

And Finally, Section D, THE LEGACY, 10 YEARS ON

Glenn Greenwald is with us. He's author of the new book With Liberty and Justice for Some. He's also a contributing writer over at Salon.com. And I wanna talk to you, Glenn, about immunity and impunity in elite America, how the legal system was deep-sixed and o- Occupy Wall Street swept the land. The most interesting point that I, I took from it is that income and wealth inequality have been present for a really long time in the United States, so that, that alone, even though it's kind of become the de facto number one cited reason for Occupy Wall Street, in your opinion, can't really be enough to have spurred this incredible coming together of events that are these protests.

So number one, what else has been a factor? But more interestingly, number two, why has that become such a convenient and popular number one reason that we're hearing? 

Right. Well, it's not just that income inequality and wealth inequality have been in the United States for a long time, although that is true.

What also is true is that it, it has been significantly increasing for several decades, so the trend line has been towards greater and greater levels of inequality. And yet you didn't really see a sustained protest movement over inequality, and I think the reason for that is because Americans are basically inculcated, for better or for worse, to accept not just the inevitability but the virtues of inequality, of wealth inequality and outcome inequality.

So for example, when someone like Steve Jobs dies with $7 billion or $8 billion in net worth, even though huge amounts of joblessness and homelessness and foreclosures and the like are sweeping the land, most people don't begrudge that because there's this sort of embedded political value in the United States that inequality is legitimate as long as it's fair and just.

And I think that's really the key behind this protest movement and what has so radically changed is the perception, obviously correct in my view, that these inequalities are no longer the byproduct of merit or hard work or deserved, achievement, but instead are really, is really the byproduct of cheating, of, of people shielding their ill-gotten gains and, and most of all, using their superior political and financial power to exempt themselves from the rule of law, from the, the rules of, of society to which the rest of us are bound so that these inequalities are no longer legitimate but are illegitimate.

And I think that's really what's sustaining the protest. And one of the reasons why you don't hear much about that and why the media has an interest in portraying this as nothing more than just sort of anger over inequality unto itself is because one of the ways of demonizing the protest or dismissing it is to say that it's nothing more than this sort of socialist or communist anger from the 1960s over the fact that some people have a lot and lazy and, and, and worthless people have very little.

and I think that's clearly not what the protest movement is about by and large. It's about the fact that, for example, the people who collapsed the world economy through their illegality and criminality have not paid any price but instead have prospered. 

You know what I think is interesting is that there's, there's, there's a several layers actually to the defenses and criticisms of Occupy Wall Street, and we've actually now seen on Twitter over the weekend, I got a ton of messages after a piece we did talking about media coverage of the Tea Party versus media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, and I got a serious email, it wasn't a parody, it wasn't sarcastic, saying, "Look at how many people have been arrested at Occupy Wall Street, and look at how many people were arrested at the Tea Party protest.

You guys gotta be nuts for thinking there's anything about the people happening at Occ- Occupy Wall Street. They're all getting arrested." And it's impossible for that... I, there's nothing I can say to that person to explain to them how actually the, the disparity in the arrests is indicative of the problem, not of how great the Tea Party is.

I've lost that person, right? I can't bring them back. 

Well, you know, s- of course that's true, and there's, you know, one of... I mean, but I will say this. I mean, one of the driving attributes of the Occupy movement that, in my view, makes it so worthwhile and compelling is that it really is a protest from the political and legal culture as a whole, from political and legal institutions.

So it's really intended to exist outside of the legal framework. whereas the Tea Party movement, certainly there was lots of civil disobedience going on there. People were bringing guns. It was much more threatening and disruptive in its own way. but I think that the Occupy movement really was intended and is intended, to purposely create a space that doesn't exist within our prevailing legal institutions.

And so the fact that people are getting arrested is certainly part, in part due to the fact that the status quo authorities see people who are protesting inequality as being, just kind of troublemakers and antagonizers and people who really deserve to be in, in jail. There's definitely that bias, but a part of it is, is that the, the occupations are by design, be, be growing without legal sanction.

and so the, the more threatening they become to those in power, I think it's just inevitable that those in power are gonna start to treat it as being threatening and, and to use their force and coercion against it, which includes arrest. But the one thing I will say is that, you know, by and large, although the media reaction has been quite negative and scornful and patronizing, polls continuously show that large pluralities, if not majorities, are sympathetic to the message of the Occupy movement because most people do indeed know that our legal and, and, and political institutions are radically broken, and that meaningful changes is possible only by working outside of them.

Sure, and it's, I mean, it's no surprise when we look over the years at polls fairly... asked polls asking people, "Do you think the government has a fundamental responsibility to provide you healthcare?" And the overwhelming majority of people, usually two-thirds or even more, do think so, but you don't see that reflected in the politicians that are elected.

You don't see that reflected in the policy that is proposed in any kind of serious way other than, you know, every once in a while Dennis Kucinich mentioning it. So it should be no surprise to us that policy does not at all reflect the will of the people, does it? 

Well, but this is, you know, that's an important point about why the occupation movement has emerged and why it continues to flourish and, and the driving force behind it.

Of course, politicians do go before the public and claim that they share the sentiments that polls reveal are, are, are embraced by majorities and promise to carry out that agenda. And huge numbers of people in 2008 were persuaded by the Obama campaign that electing Barack Obama would result in those policies being implemented.

And, and in fact, you know, I think the most significant thing about the 2008 campaign with respect to wa- the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the Obama candidacy really specifically targeted those people who had decided that working within the political system was no longer, worthwhile, or that it, they, who, who had always concluded that it wasn't worthwhile.

People who, you know, as Obama described them, were sort of wallowing in this corrosive cynicism. And that's what all of this, you know, stuff about, "Yes, we can," and, and, "Audacity of hope" was designed to do, was to persuade specifically those people that there was a, a reason, there was a value to them devoting their time, energy, and resources to electing a Democratic candidate, that things would actually change.

And when they did that and they saw that nothing changed, that everything continued as is, that the same factions continued to be served, that was really what re- in- increased the cynicism more than it had ever existed before, and it's what led so many people to the conclusion, "Well, if it didn't happen here, it's never gonna happen, and now I realize that the only viable course of action is to work outside of this system, is to dissent from it and to change the political culture rather than working for one party or the other."

And I think that, that, that is a huge energy behind this movement, is the anger and disappointment and sense of betrayal that people feel from 2008. 

My last question for you, Glenn, is, do you think that Occupy Wall Street will play a real role in the 2012 election? And let me, let me, qualify that by saying I don't mean offhanded references from either or both candidates when it's politically convenient to mention Occupy Wall Street.

But do you think in a, in any real way this will affect the upcoming presidential election? 

I do. I think, I think it'll affect it in the sense that there'll be more rhetorical attention paid to the issue of wealth and income inequality, not just offhand remarks as you suggested, but more time being spent on it, which is a positive thing.

But I think the real impact that it possibly might, i- have is that if the Obama campaign perceives, and I think this is the real risk that they're worried about already, that so much of the energy of the youth vote and the first time vote that drove him into office in 2008 is instead being directed to the Occupy movement rather than the Obama re-election 2012 campaign, then I think there's gonna be a serious effort on the part of Obama to, at least create the appearance that he's more concerned with the issues that are, occupying the occupation movement than he actually is.

And so I think you're gonna start to see some greater tactical shifts, to target those people. But, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, both of those major party candidates are gonna need to get funding from corporate and Wall Street interest, and that's who's real, that's the real constituency that they're gonna end up serving.

So the, the biggest impact may be on the fact that it just give people another outlet besides electoral politics, to express their discontent and, and that could certainly have an out- a, an impact on the outcome of the election. 

We mentioned, the Arab Spring earlier. One of the interesting aspects that came out of Occupy that I think other movements have also since then, reflected was the kind of global orientation and the interest in transnational organizing, or at least building some sort of a global solidarity with movements, and I think we've seen that resonate with, Black Lives Matter and, and the Me Too movement as well.

And also labor, I think, has, has evolved in that direction too. So I, I was wondering, if you can get outside of New York City a little bit, how you two feel that Occupy, as a kind of globally facing movement, may have informed the way people organize or the way activists see themselves. 

I think for people around the world to see for the victims of so much of the pain and death and destruction that US imperialism wreaks on them, it was, I'm sure, a, a really inspiring and heartening development to see that people are finally taking to the streets.

And because there was such a long stretch of time, Of course, there were protests throughout the 2000s. The, the most sizable protest before Occupy that I can remember was, the anti-war protests in the early 2000s before, where hundreds of thousands of people came out in the streets, not only in New York City, but ar- around the world, and we invaded anyway, of course.

So I think that once, once Occupy took off and that message spread around the world, in the same way that we were watching the Arab Spring with such hope, even though it was, it took off in New York City and then subsequently took off in other cities across the country, it was a message that was heard around the world, particularly because that message of the 99% is one that's felt in so many places around the world and, and New York City is the heart of capital So I think that message, it's hard to really put your finger on or quantify like what exactly or pinpoint, and I'm sure, Ruth, you've found this in your research when someone asks, "Do you think that this was the result of Occupy?"

It's, it's really hard to put your finger on it because it's something that is, as I said earlier, amorphous. But I think that it's, that message has definitely infused movements across the world. 

Yeah. Let's remember first that Occupy cloned itself all over the world. So it began in Zuccotti Park in, here in New York, but then w- very quickly replicated, first across the United States in hundreds of places, and then also elsewhere.

And at the same time, it was inspired, as we already talked about, by somewhat similar movements elsewhere in the world. I remember there was this wonderful, publication that appeared in Zuccotti Park, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, put together by some very talented journalists, and I remember the first issue had this timeline starting with Tahrir Square in Egypt and going, through a series of other movements and then ending with Zuccotti Park.

But of course, that wasn't the end. It continued. So there is that global story, just in the very short run, both before Zuccotti and s- and after. And then maybe this isn't so much global, but I do think the success of Occupy inspired even people who hadn't directly participated as well as many who had to become involved in other kinds of movements, including Black Lives Matter, including MeToo, all the things that we've seen develop over the last year.

And so it was the starting point of a massive wave of protests that really did not exist before 2011. Sure, there were protests here and there, but they never had the scale or captured the public imagination in the way Occupy did in the years immediately preceding. So you know, not since the 1960s have we really seen this kind of explosion of social activism, and I think Occupy was the starting point.

So even though it didn't last very long as Occupy, it became the catalyst for a whole range of, activities in the decades since. 

Yeah. And I think also in terms of the way movements like brand themselves and like sort of the circulation of symbols and imagery and slogans that, facilitated by social media, I think that Occupy was definitely the-- sort of laid out a template, right, for other movements to build upon, and hopefully we'll see other iterations of that in the coming years.

And we called our report, the report I co-authored with Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis, we called it Changing the Subject, and that was meant to have a double meaning. On the one side, as many people have pointed out, the whole issue of inequality and its explosive implications was put into the center of political conversation after twenty eleven by Occupy.

You- we've documented that just in searching Google News for mentions of the word inequality. It goes up in twenty eleven and stays up thereafter. So there's that, but it also created a new political subject. That's the other changing the subject, a new generational political subject, I would argue, that went on to do all these other things.

So some people poo-poo the whole thing as this, "Oh, it was just a couple months, these kids in the park, what's the big deal?" But in fact, my own claim would be that this really was the start of something very important that has continued since.

That's going to be it for today.

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