Air Date: 9-30-2026

Today we look at the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which was in full swing 15 years ago and changed how the country talks about inequality and the 1%. In the meantime, the cumulative wealth of the 1% in the US has roughly tripled and Trump has the wealthiest cabinet in history running the country, so the concerns expressed at Occupy have only come into sharper relief.

This miniseries helped inspire today's episode, check it out!

Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising

Full Show Notes

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

Today we look at the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, which was in full swing 15 years ago and changed how the country talks about inequality and the 1%. In the meantime, the cumulative wealth of the 1% in the US has roughly tripled and Trump has the wealthiest cabinet in history running the country, so the concerns expressed at Occupy have only come into sharper relief.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

A special miniseries from Future Hindsight, "Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising"

The Hartmann Report

This Is Hell!

The Majority Report

and Democracy Now!

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

Section A, INSIDE THE OCCUPATION

Section B, INEQUALITY'S LONG HISTORY

Section C, BILLIONAIRES AND THE BACKLASH

And Section D, FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

For every way to connect with and support us, check out our link in bio in the show notes.

And now, on to the show.

The Occupy Movement starts with a story of a generation whose promise had been abruptly halted when the economy crashed in 2008. 

The housing market collapse created one financial crisis after another, and it often seemed as if the news could only get worse. 

In just six months, three of the five biggest independent firms on Wall Street have now disappeared.

Bailing out Wall Street is the only way to save Main Street, so says the 

president. The signs were everywhere, but now it's official, we are in a recession 

The bankers who caused the crash got bailed out. Congress allocated 700 billion taxpayer dollars to stabilize the economy, and most of that money went to the too-big-to-fail financial institutions that had caused the economic meltdown.

Distressed homeowners got little assistance, and the people who'd been laid off or lost huge chunks of retirement savings because of the crash, they didn't get any bailouts. Meanwhile- 

The nine banks that received the most help from the massive taxpayer bailout gave 5,000 employees bonuses of at least one million dollars each.

In the aftermath of the crash, a lot of young people either could not afford college or were graduating with crushing student loan debt. They were entering the workforce in the middle of a deep recession, and their ability to launch a career or repay their loans or buy their first home, well, all of that had essentially been put on pause for who knows how long.

To put it another way, what COVID lockdowns were to Gen Z, the 2008 financial crash was to millennials. I want to introduce you to three people who were in their teens or early 20s when the economy took its nosedive. First is Nalini Stamp, a born and raised New Yorker, an Afro-Latina woman. 

My mother went bankrupt during the financial crisis.

We were served an eviction notice from our apartment. all of these things came crashing down, and I never was comfortable about saying it. 

A confluence of medical bills, delinquent child support, and the economic crash put them in a tight spot. Nalini was in high school at the time. 

I was "Why is there only this amount of food in the fridge?"

I didn't feel we were on steady ground. We got an eviction notice. It was a pink slip. That's when I started to not show up to school anymore. I said, "What is the point of this?" 

Nalini realized college was out of reach. The price tag was just too high. So she gave up, quit school, got a GED, started working minimum wage jobs.

By 2011, Nalini had gotten a lower level job at the Working Families Party, a pro-worker political party that runs progressive candidates. 

I have a good enough degree, a GED, and I was lying to my colleagues when I first started at the Working Families Party that I went to college for some bit of time.

I was so embarrassed by that. 

Then there's Sandy Nurse. She was born in Panama to two Navy sailors, a white American mother and a Black Panamanian father. 

I started as a kid who was a part of a US military occupying force, the mission of which is to exploit people, land, and resources for the benefit of the United States of America.

And I spent a lot of time, my, almost my entire childhood, moving around the world and seeing the reactions to that, the consequences of that. 

She went to college in the US, where she graduated with a poli sci degree and an incredible amount of student loan debt. And in 2011, she'd begun what seemed a promising career in humanitarian aid.

I was just coming off of a United Nations World Food Program in Haiti. I was visiting different cities and villages to write these reports about the distribution of food aid. At the time of the earthquake, all food systems collapsed in Haiti. 

So she's a do-gooder, trying to help Haitians in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left many more homeless.

Except the way that the UN Food Program was helping just feels wrong. The UN was paying Haitians, who had just been through a traumatic natural disaster, in food or low wages in exchange for hard labor. 

The thing that really just kinda snapped for me and, and essentially just broke my heart was seeing on this mountainside these old Haitian women in their flip-flops carrying these boulders, to make these walls to prevent the landslides.

And this is a job that most in the United States we'd see on a highway. You'd see people with, a, a backhoe or, a big claw Caterpillar thing. These, these, these women are just moving these boulders. And I just said, "This shit is n- this is not for me." we should not be asking these women to work for a sack of beans or some small dollars to do public works projects that are the job of a, a state, a nation state, or a government.

I walked away from that really let down by the promise of what I was being told as a child about the project of Am- Americanism. 

And so Sandy quit that whole endeavor, gave up on that career path to take a less ethically fraught job. 

My family was upset and didn't understand what I was doing, and they were "You're a bike...

You're a food delivery person now." 

So summer of 2011, she was delivering food to residents of gentrified Brooklyn and trying to figure out her place in the world. 

And it just so happened at that moment Occupy came about. 

Which brings me to Marissa Holmes, one of the people who planned the occupation from the beginning.

She's a soft-spoken white woman. She comes off as earnest and idealistic, not a cynic Sandy or Nalini. Maybe it's her Midwestern roots. 

I grew up in central Ohio in a small town that became a suburb, and my parents had been involved in, Democratic Party politics mostly. they definitely talked about politics, constantly.

Her dad was actually a labor lawyer for a time. 

I was in high school, when 9/11 happened. 

Terrorists declare war on the United States, hijacking jetliners, crashing them into New York's World Trade towers. 

President George W. Bush made the call to enter into a war that would end up expanding and lasting 20 years.

On my orders, coalition forces have begun selected targets of military 

I learned about, politics, and how power works, and how to organize first, from my parents, and then became more radicalized in the context of the anti-war movement. 

From then on, she was a dedicated activist. By the summer of 2011, Marisa was 25, a grad student living in Brooklyn, and part of a new anarchist group called the New York City General Assembly, and it was that group, the anarchists, who really gave life to the Occupy movement.

It was a long, hot August in the summer of 2011, and we met under the Hare Krishna tree in Tompkins Square Park. 

Tompkins Square Park is a leafy oasis in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It has all the regular things a New York City park has. A bustling playground, a dog run, old men sitting on benches feeding the pigeons, rats, and the Hare Krishna tree.

But what, you may be wondering, is the Hare Krishna tree? 

In the middle of Tompkins Square Park, there's a rather large tree with roots that 

extend out into the concrete and, and break it up, and people go there to meditate and play music and 

just be together. This huge elm tree was the site of the first Hare Krishna outdoor chanting session in the country in 1966, which is how it got its name.

In August of 2011, it became the meeting spot for the New York City General Assembly. 

I always got there early and would jot down a few things for agenda points and wait for people to show up. Usually people were late because, operating on anarchist time, people are are generally late. 

Many of the people who showed up at the Hare Krishna tree had been protesting the city's austerity measures because remember, while the financial institutions that had caused the 2008 crash had gotten massive government bailouts, city budgets all over the place had been cut, and three years later were still struggling.

They had camped outside City Hall for three weeks to protest then Mayor Michael Bloomberg's budget cuts to city services. They called that occupation Bloombergville, but it had petered out rather unsuccessfully. Now, they were hungry to do something else, and they were trying to figure out what exactly the next big thing would be.

Their meetings, which they called assemblies, would stretch on for hours as they debated strategy and principles. The afternoons in the park would turn into evenings at nearby bars, where smaller groups would continue their discussions around pitchers of beer. There was no shortage of ideas and opinions among this committed group of activists.

The challenge was getting a bigger crowd to show up to whatever direct action they planned. 

There was not a lot of social movement energy. 

This is Astra Taylor, an author and documentary filmmaker who was in her mid-30s at the time. She had already spent more than a decade as an activist, and I think it's safe to say was worn down a bit.

That was from experience. 

It was an incredibly demoralizing experience to protest in the aughts. typically what would happen is the cops would kettle you, which means that they would wrap your protest in this orange netting and haul you off to jail. Or they'd say, "Stay in this little, tiny free speech pen."

If there was political energy, it was online. There was this prankster, disruptive spirit on the internet. 

And that is where the spark that ignited Occupy came from: a meme. In July 2011, 90,000 people got an email with a stark and beautiful image. In black and white, you see the Charging Bull statue, that huge bronze beast in Manhattan's Financial District that's supposed to represent the stock market.

A ballerina is standing on top of the bull's back. She's thin, white, wearing a dark unitard. Her eyes are lowered. She's in a classic arabesque pose, arms outstretched and one leg gracefully arcing out behind her. Behind the ballerina and the bull, there's a crowd emerging from a haze of smoke. They look our stereotypical idea of anarchists, wearing gas masks and dark clothes.

They're surging forward in the same charging motion as the bull. One of them brandishes a stick. At the top of the image, in red all caps, it says, "What is our one demand?" Below it, #OccupyWallStreet, September 17th, bring tent. The email with this image came from Adbusters, an activist magazine that liked to stir up trouble.

It was known for its beautifully designed spoof ads critiquing consumer culture. Adbusters regularly instigated boycotts and encouraged people to artfully vandalize billboards. And now, their Occupy Wall Street image and hashtag was ripping through the internet. One of the groups that promoted this idea to occupy Wall Street was Anonymous, the hacktivist collective that had gained notoriety for launching cyber attacks against corporations and the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous announced that they were taking to the streets and urged people to join them. 

Hello, citizens of the internet. We're Anonymous. On September 17th, Anonymous will flood into Lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

We want freedom. This is a non-violent protest. We do not encourage violence in any way. The abuse and corruption of corporations, banks, and governments ends here. Join us. We're Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Wall Street, expect us.

A new YouGov Economist poll of registered voters that just came out this week found that the top two words that Americans across the board endorsed to describe Donald Trump are corrupt, fifty-three percent, and dangerous, fifty-one percent.

Not even half of registered Republican voters were willing to call him honest. This is consistent with Gallup's finding earlier this month that fully eighty-nine percent of Americans now believe that corruption in our government is widespread, the highest number in the two decades the polling company has been asking, and a higher number than in any other advanced industrialized democracy.

The same day that poll came out, yesterday, CBS News published photos that American service members smuggled out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia showing extensive, massive damage to barracks, facilities, and even U.S. aircraft, all done by Iranian drone and missiles. The Pentagon's own inspector general just reported that there has been three point seven billion dollars in equipment and building losses and around sixty aircraft destroyed or severely damaged.

This follows Trump last week lying through his teeth on News Nation, saying that the Iranians had inflicted no damage and no nothing on U.S. facilities and troops, eighteen of whom are now dead with hundreds more hospitalized. Trump calls that small potatoes and refused to visit the wounded troops when he was at Walter Reed a few weeks ago.

One soldier, his identity concealed, told CBS News, quote, "We're standing there with our eyes closed, getting punched in the face." Not only is Trump regularly, arguably daily, lying to America and the world about what's happening in the Middle East and dozens of other things, but that poll shows what, most Americans have figured out, which raises a vital question for our country at this pivotal moment.

What happens to a country when it loses trust in its government and leaders, and what can be done to restore that trust? I've seen the consequences of this loss of trust close, up close and personal in the year I-- years I traveled the world on behalf of a German international relief organization, and the lessons I learned are both important and grim.

In the nineteen nineties, I made several trips to Bogotá, Colombia, on solemn's behalf as I wrote about The Prophet's Way. I remember the immigration officer at the airport stamping my passport saying, "Mr. Torres, be careful." At dinner that first night, after being warned not to take taxis or trust the police, a German woman who'd lived w-- there for fifteen years flinched every time the doorbell rang.

Her husband's office manager, an ordinary middle-class guy, had been forced to watch helplessly at gunpoint as fifteen armed men broke into their house looking for their sixteen-year-old daughter. When they discovered she wasn't there, they took his wife, a friend of my dinner companion. Every night for a month, they called the husband and made his wife cry into the phone as he systematically drained every credit card, bank account, and retirement account he had.

She was only released when he'd finally mortgaged his condo and given them the last of his money and credit. She was a shell of a person afterward, barely able to speak, and the family was desperately trying to borrow enough money from friends to leave the country and go back home to Germany. The nun who ran the church where we were staying, locked into cells with steel doors and cement walls, warned us against going to a restaurant after dark and wrote down the phone number of the only trustworthy cab company in the city.

Off-duty cops and soldiers had organized hunt clubs to shoot street, street children for sport. One morning, as Horace Von Heier and I drove past a billboard advertising a gated community of upscale homes with smiling guards carrying AK-47s, we passed a teenage boy sprawled on the sidewalk in a spreading pool of blood, a uniformed man standing over him with a gun still in his hand.

Nobody in the car said a word. It was just too ordinary. This is just one small example from my own experience of what happens when people no longer trust their own government. Into that vacuum of trust rushed two types of people. The first are the predators who correctly figured that it's now open season.

We're seeing that right now as corporate America fleeces us, banks rip us off, health insurance companies deny us care to fatten profits, and oil companies and their wholly owned GOP shills lie to our faces about climate change. The second are the strongman politicians who promise that only violence and an iron fist can restore law and order.

I saw that in Kaliningrad, Russia in the 1990s when four Russian cops pulled over our car for speeding and then let us go when we gave them a case of high-end chocolates, a town where the mob-run kiosks around Lenin Square were the safest parts of town, and vodka was cheaper than bottled water. Six years later, Russia, by then exhausted by the crime and grifting of oligarchs, handed their country over to a KGB colonel who promised to make the trains run on time.

There hasn't been a free election in that country since. Recently, El Salvador ran that same script. A corrupt, on-the-take government of grifters and hustlers so ripped off the country and gutted the middle class That they voted in Nayib Bukele, a guy who describes himself as Central Bank, Central America's coolest dictator.

He proceeded to arrest and lock up about two percent of the entire country, cutting crime, but also ending democracy altogether. That's the warning for us. When trust, trust is gone, wild stuff happens to countries, and I've seen it in person from Peru to the Philippines to Uganda to South Sudan and Darfur and elsewhere.

And now I'm seeing it here as the predators and fascists are running amok in America. Trust is the single most vital component of all human relationships. With it, you can create miracles. Without it, it's hard to do anything productive. Just ask any marriage counselor. To recover trust after a betrayal can take years and requires both full disclosure, real contrition, or at least explanation, and a genuine change in behavior.

And that's exactly what Americans are struggling with right now. In a republic ours, trustworthiness necessarily begins at the top, and Donald Trump is an utterly untrustworthy man. He cheated on every one of his wives. He convinced his followers to give him a combined three point eight one billion dollars for his Trump and Melania digital coins before their value fell ninety-seven percent and he pocketed the difference.

He's made another one point four billion from crypto just in the first year of his second presidency. And then there are the murders being carried out in Trump's name and under his direction. In January, his masked thugs murdered Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse at the VA, both American citizens, on the streets of Minneapolis.

For six months, the re- the administration refused to hand the evidence of the murders over to state prosecutors and physically blocked state investigators. As of today, nobody's been charged with these crimes. That's the Bogota sidewalk, the uniformed men with high-powered rifles who know nobody will ever hold them to account for their killing sprees.

This is a pattern that's been fifty years in the making. Nixon committed treason, blowing up the Vietnam peace talks to win the nineteen sixty-eight election, and then repeatedly b- both broke the law and took bribes while in office. Ford pardoned him, telling, telling us our long national nightmare was over when he was simply setting up the n- the next phase.

Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election to screw Jimmy Carter, and when a special prosecutor began a serious investigation of that treason, G.H.W. Bush's attorney general, Bill Barr, advised him to pardon the six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve of 1992, just months before he left office.

Bill Clinton chose to ignore it all and look to the future. And when George W. Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged black Floridian citizens from the voter rollsin the months before the 2000 election so his sibling could win the state by 537 votes, and their father's appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, cast the deciding vote to stop the recount that would have revealed the crime, Al Gore just let it slide.

So the Declaration of Independence states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men in, are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator and certain, with certain unalien- unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

And you write that these words articulate a vision of a society in which no group of people occupies a special place from birth or is granted rights and privileges formally denied to others. They claim that each person, possesses a distinct moral capability and ability to make sense of the world around him or herself, and that out of that capacity comes an equal right to shape our society, a right to political participation.

And throughout American history, at least some people have argued these ideas and the organization of economic life should correspond, that no one group of people should be so rich that they are able to exert political influence in their own interest or pass down to their children a superior place in the political and social order.

How much of a threat to democracy, Kim, is great wealth concentrated in the hands of a very few, if not a single person? How much is wealth a danger to democracy? 

Well, I think i- in a way, that's the question that this whole book is about. And, I guess I would say I, I think that the, the book comes from, wanting

So this is a book about, about people who have argued in defense of inequality. But at the back of that is, are, are the many people throughout American history who have saw, who, who, who have said that there's a real, that, that concentrated wealth is dangerous and to democratic government. And I think this is a real and under-recognized, thread that goes back to the revolution and earlier, and which is deeply skeptical of, inherited privilege of all sorts, and especially of concentrated wealth.

And why is it? And I think the reasons that the, the dangers that wealth poses to democracy are many. but one is that it gives, obviously people who have this, w- this was an argument that you saw often in the revolutionary era, that people who have a lot of wealth will be able to get more access to the state than people who don't.

Also, and importantly, they will have a lot of control over the lives of people who have less wealth and fewer material resources. And this was another very important argument in the revolutionary era, that, you needed to be, for people to be free and equal subjects, they needed to have some resources of their own to meet as equals in society, not just in a formal, fictional legal sense, but actually you had to be able to have some, direction over your life, and you couldn't have that if you were just employed by somebody else.

And then I think there's another, a- a- and I think there's a, this is another, aspect of this sensibility which you see a lot in the era of the American Revolution, in particular, a sense of the arbitrary nature of wealth, that wealth is often associated with, or people then believed it was often associated with aristocracy, which seemed at heart arbitrary.

It just was a, a, a a, a privilege extended by, on basis of birth. It didn't have roots in, individual accomplishment necessarily. And it was a fantasy that some people were simply better than others and deserve to have this place. And I think I, that A hatred of arbitrary privilege is another important, and I would say very positive aspect of, American political culture.

I guess I would also say with the Declaration, even the part that you read, and you, you were alluding to this in the lead-in to the show, these, these ideas are complicated, and they weren't, They, they were certainly, obviously Jefferson was very wealthy himself.

He owned human beings. He was an enslaver. there... People did not see these... The, the people believed in different gradations, between men and women, parents and children, white and non-white people. So there is a kinda, in the revolutionary space, there's a plenty of tolerance for different forms of hierarchy.

However, I think even so, the promise of the Declaration is very quickly seized by all of these subordinate groups, by enslaved people, by free Black people in the era of the revolution, by women. And so in a way, once the promise is out there, other p- people hold onto it and push it and try to expand it past what the original intent might have been.

the social experience of the revolution also lends itself to this, which is a, a massive popular conflict that really relies on civilian support, since there, there wasn't a professional army in a, in a real way. So I, I think it's a, it's a, the chaos and potential for social upheaval and leveling at that moment, gives life to these ideas in a particular way then, and in some ways afterward.

Were those who were supportive of egalitarianism the subjugated, and the people who were the opponents of inequality the people who were powerful? I understand that, and as you write in your book, the Jeffers- Jeffersonian idea of- Mm-hmm ... equality comes from somebody who is not a subjugated, subjugated person, but was the...

Did that seem to be the tendency that the subjugated wanted the promise to be fulfilled of the Dec- Declaration of Independence and the powerful did not? 

I think it's there, there are cross-cutting currents, but yeah, I would say as a, as a broad, I, I think th- I, I think that the, the most egalitarian claims of the revolution tended to be advanced by people who were not in a very elite group.

so yeah, I think in a general way that is true. 

So what is it about the demo- 

the United States version of democracy that seems to make it so vulnerable to demands for extreme inequality and seems to promote- Yeah ... promote people who have those ideas? 

Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, it's, it's actually, that is a really interesting question, and actually one thing it brings up for me is I think, my, my book is very much a national history and a national story, but I, I suspect that you find versions of these arguments playing out in many other, parts of the world as well.

So I, I think I am real... I- it, this story is told through a, a lens focused on the US. I think, but it, but it doesn't mean ... I, I think that this has an international dimension to it, too. and I hope other scholars will, will take up that framework and look at other parts of the world through it.

I think one of the reasons that the United States has been such an intense... That, that these questions have played out in such an intense fashion in our politics, I think there are two things. One is that the claims around egalitarianism, while they have been advanced by people mo- by the most forcefully by people who are part of subordinate groups, they also in another way are written into the dominant political ideology of the country.

So it's not possible to just, completely dismiss them out of hand as the product of a rabble-rousing subordinate population. They have a certain legitimacy so that everybody across the political spectrum has to contend with them. And I think this, this lends some of the people in my book, who say repeatedly the Declaration of Independence, "The people are not actually created equal.

That's not true." everybody, whoever said that, it's just dogma. Nobody really believes that. But in every case, they have to say it with a certain sense of transgression because they are arguing against what they, too, are aware are some of the dominant ideas of the country. And so I think that lends the whole argument, a, a, a dynamic that it doesn't have elsewhere.

I think the second reason that these claims are so, that this, this conflict is so important in American politics has to do with the tension between being a democratic, a country with a formerly democratic politics and with these claims about egalitarianism that is also, such a profound... W- where capitalism has advanced so quickly and so intently and so there is always a disjuncture between what the claims are in the political structure about democracy and equality, and the reality, the material reality of the country, which does depend on, as capitalism necessarily does, on inequality, on the concentration of wealth, and on a really, a, on, on a, a, a class society.

And so I think that conflict between the political ideas of the country and the material reality of it, of, of its political economy has also meant that this, th- there's a ... It, it gives a, a, a lot of, traction to this conflict because people are constantly arguing about this and constantly noting that the economic life of the country, which at many points has tended to this extreme inequality, that it seems, not, doesn't seem to fit with the egalitarian claims that are also

have this legitimacy and this role in how, what people think the country is supposed to be about 

But I wanna talk about, w- y- you write about the idea of politics of powerlessness, which- Mm-hmm ... is still a phenomenon That is at play. And- Mm-hmm ... explain that dynamic, Yeah ... and, and then let's talk about what has come out of Occupy in the years since. 

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, okay, so, so th-this thing that I call the politics of powerlessness, which is the, one of the connective threads of the book, is, is, it's a way of describing this phenomenon where, organizations and movements start to internalize their powerlessness, and then behave in ways that make them even more powerless.

So, often because we spend a lot of the ti- a lot of our time not winning and on the margins and, the underdogs, we start to adopt a story about ourselves that that's what we're supposed to be, and that's what we're always gonna be. I came up in the anti-war movement, and after the very beginning of the anti-war movement that, that, was this, massive, record, record-breaking numbers of people in the streets, but then we didn't stop the war.

And- Yeah ... and, and, and, and, to, to a young person coming up in that movement, it, it was pretty devastating, and it really shifted my... I, it was "Oh, we're not, we're not gonna stop the war." And, it, the, it was Bush and, a-and the Patriot Act and f-flags everywhere. There didn't used to be fucking flags everywhere.

it was, it was a, it, it felt a dystopian novel. And, and you start to, you, you start to basically take on, "Okay, fine. So we're not gonna win, but we're gonna be the righteous few." And once you start to think of yourself as, as part of the righteous few, you, you then abandon a lot of the behaviors that it actually takes to build movements.

H-What actually takes to build movements is to talk to people who are really different from you. It, it's, sometimes boring, painstaking work of knocking on doors and calling people on the phone. It's, learning how to actually, run a meeting and be in healthy conflict with people and build organizations and, and navigate all these hard things that come up in groups, that inevitably come up in groups about identity, about belonging.

that, this is the stuff of the book is, ways I think that groups can do that in a more healthy way. But once you start to, once you don't think you're gonna win, whether 'cause the, the, the enemy is scary or you're just caught up in despair, you have no experience of winning before, then you start to abandon that stuff, and you become insular and self-righteous, and you turn on, you turn away from the public, you turn away from the enemy, you turn towards one another.

You, you often turn against one another 'cause that's how you can exercise the power you do have is, on one another in, in the space or online or, all this call-out stuff. I think that is one of the things that- That I learned at Occupy and experienced and also did myself at Occupy, I think that we were very confused about power.

We, we had, we, we did not have a lived experience of, of, of, of any power for the left or feeling that that was possible, and I think we acted a lot of that out on each other, and I think that came out in, in all of our stuff. especially over time as we faced more and more barriers to, to growing and faced police repression and faced all this stuff, I think we, we more and more turned inward and turned people away and, and made it hard to join.

And I, I... So that I think is one of the legacies of Occupy Wall Street. I think that it was a case study in this, this thing that we often do on the left, still I think do, though less than, than before, and we can talk about that. Yeah. I think that's part of But, but definitely 

not the only- I think this is a...

That, that, that disposition is not, I think, exclusive to left-wing politics or even politics. I just remember- I think that's right ... when, Smells Teen Spirit came out, people were bummed that Nirvana was having success. Totally. And, and I'm "G- g- well, why? What, what difference does it make?"

Deep cut. Their music's not different. Totally ... it hasn't, who cares? 

Well, people now hate The Beatles because they were popular. I'm "Dudes-" 

They- "... 

they fucking made great music. What do you want?" It's I, I think it's true. I think you're right. I actually think the right wing has some of this stuff, too.

I think the implo- the, the ways that some of the far right turn in on themselves is similar to this. But, but I, I think the, 

But I'm happy about that. Yeah. Totally ... but e- exactly. That's a- 

I hope they don't read my book and get better at their internal shit. 

well, and so but let's l- when we talk about Turning away from, people, where do, what, how far do we cast out, Mm

when we're casting our lines? who's- Mm-hmm ... in that group that we shouldn't be turning away from? Because there are some- Yeah ... people in my- Yeah, yeah, yeah ... estimation where it's I'm not wasting... The return on investment, I hate to use a business term, but that's basically what we're talking about, is not- Mm-hmm

worth it for- Yeah ... a significant portion of the country. Totally. if you're trying to make an example out of them or you're trying to use it to illustrate some other point. But so who are we talking about? Because- Fair ... I just started- Yeah, yeah ... the show by, slamming, Neera Tanden and Sarah Longwell, Yeah, yeah

for attacking- Mm-hmm ... Mamdani. Mm-hmm ... but there are ilk that, maybe they're on- Totally ... the far out reaches, frankly, but there's... It's almost the people who are just ignorant as opposed to- Mm ... willfully, ignorant. 

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. Look, I think, yeah, it's true.

Movements, they, they set boundaries one way or another. we have to do it 'cause we're, we're obviously we're saying, "No, this, this thing is not right. w- this way the world is organized is not right. We're not okay with it. We're gonna fight that." And, and so, and, and it's important that we have, we, that we get real about the fact that we have opponents in that.

and, and, and opponents who are, if we're being honest, they're trying to kill us. they're literally... They, they, i- before they give up power, they'll certainly wanna kill quite a lot of us and, and, and they're driving the whole civi- the entire civilization off a cliff. So it's not a, it's not a game, and I think we have to be serious about the fact that we don't mean for everybody to belong.

But I think our movements tend to be protective of themselves for, for good reason. We've been... a lot of people come to movements because they've been hurt, they're, because, because they don't trust the mainstream, because they hate the mainstream, because, And, and we start to then adopt these behaviors that are, litmus tests to be able to join.

you have to be, you have to show how radical you are. You have to all this stuff. Okay. Well, I, here's a good story for this. I know we're both, we're both, we, we are both amateur softball players. 

That's- 

I know this much ... 

that's correct, and we have, overlap in the leagues that we're in. 

Yeah, so we know, we know some of the same people and maybe you're good.

I'm not very good.

My, my softball story is the opposite, is I, I went to join, this, this is basically a pickup- 

Yep ... 

softball league that's been, it's been running for 30 years or something 

that. mine too. Yeah. 

a lot of old men and people with, with busted knees and whatever, and they're, they're...

And, and, and some really great players and, and, and I was looking for something to do that wasn't movement work, and so I went and I joined this thing. And I was fine for the first couple of games, and then I think what ended up happening is I got put in positions where I was actually gonna be tested.

they were warming me up. And then I had a couple of games where I, I was f- catastrophically bad. I was I made a bunch of errors And you're I hadn't played in 20 years. I played when I was a kid in high school, and not well, And, and suddenly I'm just, a, a few...

This is a story I, I write in detail in the book if you wanna know how painful each error was. But it was... But, softball's one of these sports where you can't... There's nowhere to hide, If you're gonna fuck up, everyone's watching. You- you're gonna hit the ball or you're not, nobody can help you.

You're gonna catch it or not, nobody can help you, And, I came 

out of that- And when you're playing with adults, particularly in, my experience in Brooklyn has been people let about it. 

Totally. Yeah, and I, I, I very quickly got demoted and, and, and I had a breakdown over this.

I was spent way too much of my therapy money talking about the, this, this felt new to me. failing in public as an adult, And, and, I, I tend to be in movement spaces as a facilitator. My work is as a movement facilitator for, for groups going through hard stuff, and I, I'm, I'm, I'm in spaces where I'm the one directing the flow of things, and here I am just sucking and not being in charge.

And I, I had a real hard time with it. And, over time what happened wa- I s- I decided to stay and not just quit, 'cause I had so much fun in those first few games. I felt alive and connected and, and, a kid again. And a couple things happened when I decided to stay over time.

One is I made friends, and, and some of those guys are really my buddies now. And the other is that I got better. 

It's, it's ridiculous to have to say this out loud, but it is actually a profound thing to re-realize as, as an adult that when you practice something, you become better at it. And good, healthy things, communities or organizations, they expect that you are not great when you come, you might even be broken by the system, and they trust themselves to be able to take you in and, they're not afraid of you, and they let you stay long enough to improve.

And, the thing about softball is, I wasn't asked to... Nobody expected anything really of me except that I would play, play by the rules and, try. try to al- not let my team down. That's, what it is to be part of a team sport. And I think this is how I'm connecting it back to the movement stuff, is I think our movements are often the opposite.

Because we're scared, and because we've been hurt, and because we have a lot to protect, really a lot of marginalized people to protect, who are fucked over by the system, by empire, we often create pretty harsh boundaries for people where they have to prove themselves before they join. And that is not a winning strategy.

That's not how mass movements are made. And, the parts of the right that are successful, they do the opposite. They really expect you to be broken, and they come, and they, they, they, they're ready to transform you. They take you for whatever you are, and they put you to work. And I think our movements need to get better at that.

so to your question of, who belongs and who not, we have opponents we need to fight. But really, a lot of people in this country, a lot of people in this world, they're up for the taking. They're looking for a place to belong. They're hurt by the system. They could very easily be convinced to turn on it.

They would benefit from the world that we wanna win. A lot of them know that already, and simply the reason that most of, most people are not in movements is because they don't really believe that they don't know how to do, join them, and they don't really believe that anything can change. But we know that things can change and, and, and that that's, we need to organize them in order for that to happen.

it's hard to track how, the impact that movements have when they're happening, and Occupy is a complicated one.

I rememb- I remember actually in the immediate aftermath wondering, "What did we accomplish? Did we win anything?" And feeling, a lot of loss and despair. But it's really clear to see now, 15 years back, how much of an impact it's made. I think obvious things thousands of people get politicized in these big movement moments, and that definitely happened with Occupy Wall Street.

And, and, and then, and then training of lots of leaders and building of lots of organizational infrastructure that m- movements really didn't have at that time. But I think the biggest impact, I think the biggest contribution, is the, is the 99% and the 1%, this intervention in, in the language of this co- Of the public.

I think this is what movements often do really well when they're successful, is they change the public's common sense about something. And Occupy Wall Street changed the public's common sense about class, and class struggle, and inequality in this country. And I think when you, y- I, I, think it's hard to see how you get a, a Bernie Sanders 2016 run without the public shifting its relationship to that story.

Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades, bless him. And, and but, but suddenly it was popular, and that's because movements came around and made it a thing, and then, and, and, effective organizations and, and, and, and good politicians can, can support that and turn it into something durable, and that's how you get, Bernie, and AOC, and the Squad, and so on.

And, and yeah, I think that's a huge impact. 

you'll talk- you talk about the, the ins- the international inspirations to Occupy, 'cause clearly about a year earlier, the Arab Spring had broken out in May of 2011. The, the, the Indignados in Spain. To what degree the activists, in New York and across the United States were aware or inspired by those movements?

Yeah, I think we were hugely... I, I think a lot of the people in the heart of Occupy Wall Street were hugely inspired by those movements, by, by Arab Spring, and, yeah, the Indignados in Spain, and, movements all across. and yeah, and really saw ourselves as part of a, a lineage of, of mass movements in the streets, taking, taking life into their own hands, I think we were.

And, and I think even the forum, the decentralized taking over public squares, w- we were deeply inspired by those movements. 

Yotam, on September 19thtwo days- Mm-hmm ... after the start of Occupy, Democracy Now! interviewed the late activist and anthropologist, David Graeber, who's been credited with helping to coin Occupy's defining rallying call, "We are the 99%."

He talked about who showed up on the first day- Mm ... of the protest. 

It was mostly young people, and most of them were people who'd gone through the educational system, who were deeply in debt, and who found it completely impossible to get jobs. these people have felt, really feel very strongly that, they did the right thing.

They did exactly what they were supposed to. The system has completely failed them, and they're not going to be saved by, by the people in charge. You're just gonna ha- if there's gonna be any society we, worth living in, we're going to have to create it ourselves. 

That's the late David Graeber.

Of course, he was talking, about the... That was two days after September 19, 2011. And then Occupy, that mass protest in October in Times Square. Talk about the scene- Mm ... and looking up- Mm-hmm ... and seeing the ticker. 

Yeah. so this is a, a, a story in my, in, in my book too, that, I, I helped, played a bunch of roles at Occupy Wall Street, and one of them was hel- helping to pull off this October 15th action, which was our, our biggest day of action.

And, we're tearing through the streets of New York and shutting down banks and blocking traffic. And it was also the day that I think a hundred, 150 occupations started in other cities around the country, and not just big cities, but also, a parking lot in Idaho and, the state lawn in wherever.

And, really, it became, a significant political force. And it, that day ended in Times Square with, 80,000 people. And, I remember this moment, standing on a trashcan in Times Square. And the, and Times Square has these massive buildings and, and the, the, the ABC building has a ticker, a rolling ticker that, that pumps out the news.

And we're standing there, and the ticker goes, "Occupy Wall Street goes worldwide." while we're there. And it's this time stops kinda moment. And I look back at that as a, a- actually, as a, as a pretty transformative moment for me, and I think, I think in a way Occupy was very transformative for a whole generation of us.

for me, what that moment was, was a, a first feeling that we could build movements that, that were powerful, that were popular. I think I had, I had come, grown, grown up in, in movements that, that had lost and were used to losing. And, and had, and, and I think we over time accepted the idea that we were gonna be on the margins.

We were gonna be the righteous few, but we weren't gonna win. And Occupy Wall Street was this first glimmer of, of, oh, we could be, we could be, powerful. We could be something that the public is paying attention to. We could potentially win. And, and of course, that's not exactly how Occupy played out, but when you look at, that is a, that is an important prerequisite to movements, is the sense that we could be powerful.

But movements that don't believe that they can win tend to take on, hard dynamics internally. 

And Tom, and you mention in your book For Lou- For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness. And it, but clearly as you also mentioned, a, a lot of what of the, the protesters were hoping for has, did not occur.

And, and you also deal with the, the conflicts and divisions that develop within the movement. I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. 

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I think, look, I think Occupy Wall Street brought us a lot, and I think there's a lot to be grateful for. but I also think in some ways it was an embodiment of this thing that I call the politics of powerlessness, which is the h- when movements and organizations, internalize the sense that they belong on the margins and that they're always gonna be on the margins, whether because, out of, out of bad habit or, or having lost for a very long time or feeling despair in the face of the climate crisis or this towering opponent.

When movements don't believe that they can win, they tend to turn away from our opponent. We turn to, turn away from the public we're supposed to be organizing, and we turn towards each other and, and often against each other because that's what we can control. We, we don't to feel powerless in the face of this big wide world, so we, we, we enact power on each other, and that often looks tearing down leaders.

It looks forming these tight clubs that, that are, are really hard for everyday people to join. it, it looks battles over identity and, and, and, and things that. and, and a conflict avoidance and, that, that makes all, all that possible. So the, the book is really about, Occupy was in a way, a- a- a case in that m- where I learned a lot of that.

And then the book is, is stories from, my work as a, as a movement facilitator and strategist for, for, for social movement organizations, supporting them to work through that thing and watching them break through those patterns over the course of the last, 10, 15 years, in- Yeah, that's what by the politics of powerlessness, and

yeah. I'll stop there. 

And, and, and to what degree do you think the, the decentralized, autonomous, anti-hierarchical, approach of the Occupy, protesters, made it more difficult for them to actually, once the protest ended, build, national organizations that could actually exercise power? D- Yeah.

Have you thought about that? 

Totally. Yeah, it's a g- another good question. I, I think, all the things that made Occupy magical were also its self-destruct mechanism, The leaderlessness was a thing that invited people to join and take agency and, and, and be creative and, and, and movements often are decentralized, and that's how they go to scale.

But it also made it impossible to figure out, to, to craft a strategy, to build long-term organization, to really absorb all these thousands of people who were being politicized. in some ways, that is just part of what happens in movement moments, and it's the responsibility of... I- it's our responsibility as movements to be building organizations and, and parties and things that can capture that momentum.

But I, but I do think that, yeah, we, we got it wrong on a lot of things. We, we had a ton of internal conflict that, that, that really, I think, jeopardized the project. 

The legacy of Occupy is really a culture shift. It wasn't a structural shift, but I think culture shifts make room for structural shifts. 

That's Brooke Lehman, the anarchist activist and Lehman heir. 

In that brief period of time, lots of things become possible that weren't possible, and then the gravity returns.

The movements die back, but things have shifted, and then other organizations that are more capable of creating structural change can come in and move the needle in different ways. 

If you imagine a big gust of wind hitting a dandelion and the seeds being dispersed across a field, that's what happened to Occupy.

Activists carried their specific projects or ideas forward in new ways. Some were more radical, Occupiers who shut down some West Coast shipping ports to disrupt the commercial supply chain. Other Occupiers tried making structural changes through the more usual channels, crafting policy, lobbying, or running candidates.

And while Occupy Wall Street never had demands, many of these offshoots did. I want to zoom in on some of them to illustrate how Occupy's principles of mutual aid, direct action, and inclusivity were sharpened and put into practice as our Occupiers moved through the world after the eviction.

Those moments of uprising are really important because they bring people into the fold, they energize people, they motivate people to come and kinda dream together. But then you have to do the hard work of, sustaining that and turning that into political strategy. 

Remember Astra Taylor? She was the filmmaker and writer who was certain that Occupiers were going to get beat up and kicked out of the park the very first night.

When they didn't, she jumped into the action herself. 

This was the second or third day of Occupy. Somebody was standing in a corner of the park and shouting a carnival barker, "Step right up and write down what you're worth to the 1%." So people were just stepping up and writing down their debts, and I had a lot...

I felt this resistance in my chest to the idea of putting down the number. 

But Astra did write down how much she owed and saw that a lot of her peers were in even deeper debt. Together, they started questioning the conventional wisdom that being broke only happens to people who don't take, quote, "personal responsibility for their finances".

Are we all just idiots who made mistakes, or is there something wrong with the system that's driving us into debt for the necessities of life? Why do we have to take on debt to get an education, or if we get cancer need to go to the doctor, or just, to put food on the table because we've lost our job because of the economic meltdown?

something's wrong here. 

Astra was recruited into a working group focused on debt, and together they realized something. 

The vast majority of us who had come to the encampment were indebted, and you cannot separate the existence of a handful of billionaires from the existence of hundreds of millions of debtors.

These are twin phenomenon. 

They started having what they called debtors assemblies, asking people to tell their stories. Their work evolved into a campaign called Strike Debt, which sought to erase medical debt for people who were underwater. 

So we, as part of Strike Debt, thought, "Well, what if we do something where we bail out the people, where we demonstrate on a small scale what it is that the government should have done?"

They came up with a brilliant and creative plan. 

So just as mortgages are bought and sold and bundled and treated as assets, as commodities for people to profit from, our other debts are as well. Our medical debts, our student loans, our credit card bills, our utility bills, all of these things are sold by debt collectors on shady secondary markets.

And so we basically figured out how to intervene in that market, debt collectors, except in order to buy the debts and erase them. 

Portfolios of people's overdue debts, from medical bills to phone bills, are bundled and sold. So when you're finally paying that overdue medical bill, the money isn't going to the hospital, it's going to the owner of the debt who bought the debt for a fraction of what you are now paying back.

We thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we raised $50,000 and we were able to buy a million dollars of medical debt?" And we called this project the Rolling Jubilee. Our, our project went viral. We ended up raising something $700,000 and buying and erasing, over a period of about a year and a half, over $32 million worth of medical debt, payday loans, and other kinds of debts.

And we sent these beautiful letters to just thousands and thousands and thousands of strangers saying, "This is a no-strings-attached gift. The Rolling Jubilee and Occupy Wall Street are setting you free of this debt as an act of, mutual aid." And we called it a people's bailout. 

Imagine getting a letter that.

The medical bills you thought would bankrupt you, that kept you up at night, were suddenly gone. 

We had the most heartbreaking inbox of all time. We had people saying that they were contemplating suicide because of their debts. It was a real education of just h- the depth of the crisis, and how deeply devastating that debt is to people, not just their economic lives, but their emotional lives.

They knew, of course, that this one project wasn't a solution to a systemic issue. There were billions of dollars of debt being bought and sold. But it was a public education, showing people that their debts were treated as assets, and that it was possible to do things differently if there was political will.

Why should the hospital sell off your debt for three cents on the dollar to a debt collector, to a predatory debt collector, but not to you? 

Their work led to other efforts, including a student debt strike that pushed student debt relief onto the national political agenda. 

So just the government can bail out banks, it can actually cancel federal student loans.

That one small working group 

helped launch a national conversation about debt relief. By the end of the Biden administration, federal debt relief initiatives had provided relief to roughly 5.3 million borrowers. 

Those are absolutely direct consequences of Occupy Wall Street. 

And that was just one way Occupiers put the principles of mutual aid and collective action into practice.

I want to briefly turn to Marissa Holmes. She lives in Spain now, a move she made last year after realizing she was being investigated by the FBI because of her association with a local anarchist group. In the years after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, Marissa continued participating in Occupy movement actions.

I was involved in various offshoots, including Strike Debt and some of Occupy Sandy. 

Occupy Sandy illustrates mutual aid at work in another powerful way. In 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy left large parts of New York and New Jersey flooded and without power. Occupy activists organized a network of about 60,000 volunteers to help residents of the hardest hit areas.

They provided hot meals, flashlights, and other necessities, transportation, and eventually repaired or rebuilt homes. There were no leaders, no center of command, no bureaucracy, just immediate relief. In fact, Occupy Sandy volunteers were so fast, efficient, and numerous that the Department of Homeland Security wrote a glowing report about their efforts.

It was proof that horizontalism and mutual aid could be incredibly effective. 

During Occupy and after, there was this emphasis on mutual aid, which meant, self-organizing to meet each other's needs. Certainly, a lot of that happened, in Occupy Sandy and at the neighborhood level through assemblies, but also, projects continuing, setting up neighborhood associations and cooking food or filling the fridges or doing coat drives.

it's just what people do when there's a crisis, when they're in distress, to help one another. it's really basic. if the state isn't going to help, and corporations are certainly not going to help, what do you do? you have to turn to your neighbors and, figure out how to survive.

Of course, mutual aid is an old concept, and Occupy was a 21st century version of it. People self-organized through social media platforms, online donation systems, text loops, and shareable spreadsheets, and Occupy brought these skills to thousands of new people. These kinds of mutual aid projects also highlight where our government is failing.

Whether a hurricane has flooded your city or you need expensive cancer medication, a functioning society should be able to rely on its government to help, not a GoFundMe or volunteer group.

We've just heard clips starting with

Future Hindsight's special series, "Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising," exploring how a generation crushed by the 2008 crash, student debt, and a $700 billion bank bailout came together in 2011 to launch Occupy Wall Street.

The Hartmann Report described how collapsing public trust let predators fleece ordinary people and strongmen take power, pointing to Russia and El Salvador as warnings for America under Trump.

This Is Hell! traced the founding tension between the Declaration's promise that all men are created equal and a capitalist reality built on concentrated wealth and class hierarchy.

The Majority Report laid out how despair and past defeats led organizers to turn against one another instead of doing the slow work of talking through differences.

Democracy Now! reflected on how Occupy's 99% versus 1% framing changed the public's common sense about class, even as the leaderlessness that drew people in undercut the movement.

And Future Hindsight also mapped how Occupy dispersed like dandelion seeds, its offshoots erasing $32 million in medical debt and mobilizing 60,000 volunteers to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy.

And those were just the top takes, there's a lot more in the deeper dive sections,

We can only make this show with your support and that includes following us on all the platforms you use. Check out our link in bio right in the show notes for every place to follow us and every way to support us, including one-time donations.

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.*

We have a voice message line and I sometimes ask a discussion question to kick things off but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show.

So, here's today's question:

How do you remember experiencing Occupy from back then and how does it compare to how you see things in retrospect? And, looking back now, what effect, if any, do you think it had on your own life, your politics, your perspective, or anything else? Any story, large or small, would be of interest!

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message or email us through our link in bio in the show notes.

Now, for my thoughts today,

First things first, I wanna give a special mention to the team over at the Future Hindsight podcast. We're featuring several clips from them today, pulled from their miniseries, Occupy! An unfinished uprising.

Months ago, one of their producers, Zach Travis, reached out to me to let me know about the series they'd put together to mark the 15th anniversary of Occupy, and that's what put it on my calendar.

We're always stretched a bit thin here so it was because of that heads-up I got from Zach that allowed me the time to go sifting through our archives so that we could pull together what became our Deep Cuts episode, 1823. It was made up entirely of our own archival material of things we had curated from Occupy news back in 2011, as it was happening in real time, as well as a little bit of retrospective discussion from the 10-year anniversary.

As I said, we're featuring some clips from Future Hindsight's series in today's episode, but there's so much more. We highly recommend you go check out the full series for yourself. You can find it in the regular podcast feed of Future Hindsight, and we'll include a link in the show notes.

If you missed our previous Occupy episode, check that out as well, that's where I did my commentary about Occupy.

I'll be foregoing a full commentary today. I've mentioned in previous episodes recently that I've been a bit overloaded with work and ended up suffering from a bout of burnout. I'm happy to report that I feel like I'm very much on the upswing from that, partly thanks to my decision to reduce the number of commentaries I produce while attempting to get through this work project bottleneck I created for myself.

The show's been going through a major financial squeeze this year, and we had to do some fairly major cutbacks on what we were able to produce. At the same time, I threw myself into a large and unwieldy, multifaceted project of coming up with new strategies for how to get us to a better place by expanding the audience and raising revenue, hopefully.

That's eventually what led, predictably, to the burnout. Part of what has helped has been thinking everything through with a fresh perspective and deciding to focus much more narrowly on one piece of the project at a time, while allowing others to be put on hold, guilt-free.

The two big pieces were a renewed social media strategy and a newsletter. Trying to do both was delaying both so I'm putting the newsletter on hold to allow focus on breathing new life into our social media accounts.

To that end, I've made it as easy as possible for you to find all of our accounts. There's now a link in bio that lives permanently in our show notes that will take you to a list of every place you can connect with us, so please check that out.

One last note on burnout with the caveat that I'm gonna talk about my AI use without endorsing AI just like I'd tell you about my driving habits without endorsing oil companies. I don't particularly wanna be using AI but feel like capitalism made me do it.

With that in mind, I mentioned in a previous update that another element of the burnout I was experiencing had definitely come from working with AI. I don't think it takes too long for AI to become mildly annoying for the average user but if you stick with it long enough, it genuinely turns into a nails-on-chalkboard level of grating experience which will eventually burn you out.

There is plenty of advice on tweaking AI settings to sound less artificial. The more you use them, the more their repetitive phrases stand out and every instance begins to feel like a small poke in the eye.

The advice generally revolves around creating rules that bar a chatbot from using those AI-speak stock phrases and formats, but they only do so much good. It ends up being like a game of whack-a-mole where squashing one problem just reveals the next. But I think I found a better way.

Instead of giving my chatbot a long list of things it's banned from saying, I decided to try to give it a persona. That way, it wouldn't be following a set of negative rules pushing it away from sounding like a generic AI, it would be following a set of positive rules, drawing it toward the persona I told it to adopt and making it naturally move away from those generic AI phrases because they don't fit the persona.

So, I just had to decide on a persona. I knew it couldn't be too over the top and zany but I did want it to be amusing. Part of the problem with AI is that it's so dry and uninteresting to read. But it also had to be a persona that I was deeply familiar with so that it wouldn't use any words or phrases that tripped me up. I just needed some seasoning to my AI responses, not a whole new vocabulary.

With those elements in mind, deeply familiar and mildly amusing but not zany, I'm tempted to ask you to guess what I chose or to share what you would pick, but when I told producer Deon he said he never would have guessed in a million years so I won't hold out on you.

In the end, I programmed my chatbot to speak to me like my 14-year-old self. I know that character well and my slang usage was at its peak then. I told it to adopt the persona of a 14-year-old boy in the year 1998 who is living in California and likes alternative rock music as opposed to rap music, which was very important for building an identity at the time. And, of course, I made sure it now swears at me.

I'll say that it's not as entertaining on week three as it was on day one but I'm not tired of it yet. And when it calls me "dude" and sprinkles in a "hella" or a "rad" every once in a while, it definitely breaks up the monotony. So, if you're looking to soothe the AI blues yourself, you could do a lot worse than chatting with a version of your younger self to take the edge off.

Now, seamlessly, back to the legacy of Occupy and the horrors of capitalism as we continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, INSIDE THE OCCUPATION

Followed by Section B, INEQUALITY'S LONG HISTORY

Section C, BILLIONAIRES AND THE BACKLASH

And Section D, FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

The day to occupy arrived, September 17th, 2011, a Saturday. Marisa and a bunch of the other hardcore activists were ready to set up camp outside the New York Stock Exchange. 

I woke up around 8:00 and packed my backpack, which was quite large. I'm 5'2" and it was probably, my size. I made my way on four trains and then I got off at the Wall Street stop and wandered around and realized that the police were already there and there were barricades up.

Since they couldn't actually get to the Stock Exchange, Marisa and her fellow activists from the New York General Assembly rerouted the group to Zuccotti Park. The crowd, some with signs, some playing instruments, made their way there. Nalini showed up at Zuccotti and looked around. The Occupiers had been doing yoga, face painting, eating peanut butter sandwiches, singing.

There was already a drum circle. It didn't feel very serious. 

I felt I was in the movie Hair. It was very, hippy-dippy. I was political to the point of doing stuff, but I never was "I'm an anarchist or a socialist." I just cared that the rich have too much money. I knew it in my bones that, rich people, corporations, they're crazy, and it was an injustice.

But I just looked around and was "Yeah, I'm gonna be here for, an hour." 

Eventually, the festival part of it all that Nalini really wasn't feeling transitioned into something deeper and more personal. 

For the afternoon, people were having small group conversations on questions that we had come up with in the New York City General Assembly, and those questions were loosely, what world do you wanna live in?

What's happening right now with the economic crisis? How do we get from where we are now to this world that we wanna live in? 

Astra arrived in time for the small group conversations. 

What was so striking to me and, and caught my imagination out of the gate was that instead of standing there and chanting, which would have been a conventional thing to do, that's what protesters usually do, we were all told to sit in small circles with our neighbors.

And so we immediately organized ourselves into these mini assemblies, groups of maybe a dozen to 15 people, and we just started talking, and that already felt w- such a break with the usual script because instead of standing outside the New York Stock Exchange and saying, "You suck," and shouting at it, we were actually building bonds with each other.

People had all kinds of stories, they had hitchhiked across the country and had nothing, had no job, no money just, used whatever they could to, to get to the occupation. And there was this palpable sense of rage, this simmering rage that people wanted to unleash. People had been waiting for years to say something, and they finally could say it.

Nalini had certainly felt that way. She'd been carrying the shame of the empty fridge, the eviction notice, her lack of college education, the lie to her employer that she hadn't been able to afford the college education she had put on her resume. She was suddenly hearing stories just hers from other people.

What shifted for me was that general assembly that first night, and people getting up and telling their stories. 

At first, people told their stories in these small groups, and then the whole crowd, estimated to be almost 1,000 people, was brought together for a general assembly. In anarchist fashion, there was no leader, just a facilitation team that invited everyone to take turns speaking.

I remember somebody saying that their parents' home got foreclosed upon. I remember hearing somebody just said, "I went to all this college and have all this debt," and we were all told we had to go to college to get a better job, and somebody was "And I'm working at Starbucks." Not that it's solidarity with the Starbucks workers union, but that wasn't what we were told you go to college for, right?

There was a building sense of connection, of no, it wasn't just you or your bad choices that put you in debt. There's a pattern here. With each confession, there was this- 

This sense of hope. We know how bad it is, and we just need to come together and build this space, and, it's gonna happen.

And we are the people to do it. The sense of urgency and commitment was really... I had never seen that before. 

Part of it was the way all of this was unfolding. They used something called the people's mic, where everyone had to repeat what the speaker was saying. And again, anyone could speak. There weren't leaders or vetted speakers.

And then there were the twinkle fingers, where you waggle your fingers to show agreement. It was just so different from anything Nalini had seen before. 

This whole, hands thing, twinkle fingers, I was "Okay, this is gonna be wild." 

But she was, in spite of herself, inspired. She stood up to speak at one point.

I remember getting up. I don't remember what I said. I think I was "I hate the blah, blah, blah." But I don't remember what I said, but that moment I sat down after I spoke, and I was "Whatever's happening, I it. I'm gonna do what needs to be done." 

That moment of cynicism turning to optimism was happening for other people at the park too, including Sandy, who had arrived with friends.

I can't explain exactly why I stayed. I just know that we went down, we went for this little march, and then we hung out in the park and participated in these breakout group conversations. 

Of course, the powers that be wanted them out of the park. In the spirit of direct democracy, the decision to stay or go was up to the group as a whole.

So Marissa took a bullhorn to make an announcement. 

A really amazing

process of direct democracy. and but we recognize that, this is a specific group, a gathering of, that we have here, and we wanna hear from people here to see how, we can proceed tonight. so one of our, our first orders of business is, are we going to stay or not? She passed the bullhorn to someone else from the facilitation team.

I'm here with some logistical information. This, this square, this square is technically a privately owned square.

We, we, we have been in contact with the property owner who has told us

that his intention is to not allow people to sleep in this park tonight. The pros and cons were weighed. The sun fully set. People were lit by flashlights, and at some point, the bullhorn was replaced by the people's mic, perhaps to dissuade the cops from issuing noise violations. 

Facilitation team

This was a moment for each individual, Sandy, Astra, Nalini, and everyone else to decide would they stay or would they go? Sandy. 

The crowd kept getting thinner and thinner, and we just kept hanging out, and eventually we just decided, yeah, we're gonna stay the night. fuck it. See what happens. We don't have much on the line, 'cause we're not fully invested in the idea that we're gonna get the world we want, so let's just, hang out here with these folks who seem angry, too.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the park, Nalini was making the same decision. 

Me and my friends, we were "You're gonna sleep here?" We're "Yeah." 

Astra made a different choice. 

I headed home because I did not think this tiny ragtag group had a snowball's chance in hell of staying the night. No way. I could see the cops.

They were coming closer, and my sense was that they were gonna go, "Okay, kids, you've had enough. we're gonna beat the shit out of you." That's what I thought was about to happen, and I didn't wanna be there for that. 

Marissa was anxiously watching the police in riot gear. 

I was terrified because I didn't feel we had prepared enough.

I really f- I felt this sense of responsibility, so I was both excited and terrified of what would come next. 

Going to Brooklyn was about expressing solidarity and trying to show that the outer boroughs, this is something we are all experiencing. 

It was an invitation to draw more working class people and people of color into Occupy. At first, it was a joyful walk on a sunny day. A marching band was in the crowd, and people were dancing their way to the bridge.

So when you're coming up to the bridge on the Manhattan side, if you're gonna go into Brooklyn, there's a point in which you can go onto the walkway, which is a famous tourist walkway, and there's vendors, and everyone goes over it, and then there's a space where the cars go, which is the traffic part that people drive over the bridge.

If you follow the bridge's pedestrian path, you go up an inclined sidewalk and end up walking high above the cars that are crossing into Brooklyn. 

The plan was not to take the roadway, and as we were marching and coming upon the bridge, some folks in the crowd who wanted more aggressive action, a group of individuals, I guess what we would say now is, Black Bloc, Antifa, kinda came to the front and just said, "We're taking over the, the roadway."

If they took the roadway, they would almost certainly be arrested, and that was not the plan. 

I was "That's not what the fuck we're doing. This is a lot of people with us, children. We're not putting kids on a fucking roadway." I was hot. This was a a screaming match, but during that screaming match, we managed to arrive at an agreement to offer options.

So I was "Cool. Here's what's about to happen. You can tell people there's two options, 'cause we're literally at a fork. So I'm gonna tell people if they don't wanna risk arrest, they come this way, and if folks who are open to risking arrest go that way. Is that something we can agree on?" 

So Sandy climbed onto an elevated footing at the base of the bridge and started screaming, "This way is non-arrestable," as she pointed to the walkway, and, "This way is risking arrest," pointing to the road.

She repeated this over and over as hundreds of people streamed past her. Not everyone heard Sandy's warning or the warnings of one police officer on a loudspeaker.

I am ordering you to leave this, this roadway now. If you do so voluntarily, no charges will be placed against you. If you refuse to leave, you'll be placed under arrest and charged with disorderly conduct. 

And then a group of police officers themselves walked onto the empty roadway, seemingly leading the crowd into the street.

Hundreds of people followed the cops and filled the road. Most seemed unaware that any warnings had been issued at all, including Nalini Stamp. She's the native New Yorker who couldn't afford college and had been evicted with her mom during the 2008 crash. 

I remember seeing anything. I was on the walkway, and the march split off and went on the bridge.

I just was "Whoop, I'm jumping down." 

Nalini literally jumped from the elevated pedestrian walkway onto the road below, excited to take the street. Marissa, our anarchist organizer/grad student, was already on the roadway filming the crowd. 

There are thousands of people who had joined, a lot of young people, also, rank and file union folks.

It was this broad spectrum of people who, who came out. I joined them and, ended up in the middle filming, and then people started screaming, "It's a kettle."

And to escape being arrested, some people started climbing the, the sides of the bridge and hanging on to the pedestrian walkway. 

In Marissa's footage, dozens of people are scaling the metal grid that separates the roadway and the pedestrian path, maybe 20 feet above. Things started to get a little wild.

They did try to pepper spray, but there were kids in that crowd. There were 12-year-olds. There was, I remember a little kid with a little bunny rabbit hat. Cops go off on white babies? what? I was so, flabbergasted. 

After the Antifa folks, and then the police, basically led people onto the roadway, the police unrolled orange netting and trapped hundreds of people in the middle of the bridge.

It was a classic move called kettling. No one was allowed to leave. Eventually, buses began to show up. 

We were just all sitting, standing there, and they started to push back on the crowd. And then when the damn buses rolled up, I was "Are they gonna kill us?" 

One by one, police started zip-tying people's wrists together and putting them on the buses.

Protesters said they were held in the buses for four hours before being taken to jail. 

That was the middle of the day. I didn't get into a cell until nighttime. They did give me McDonald's, though. I'll tell you that. They gave me a cheeseburger. That was nice. 

At the end of the day, they arrested, what, 700, 800 people on these buses, and people who didn't know they were gonna get arrested.

It was a moment where a lot of conflict happened, a lot of media attention happened. It brought greater numbers of people to the encampment. conflict generates interest, and that's what happened. But I also was very disappointed because I felt people were robbed of their ability to make a decision, and that to me was where I had some, just real splits about what we're doing.

It was a concrete example of how consequential a movement's tactical decisions can be, and how fraught. Sandy had wanted to follow a plan and follow the law. Keep people on the pedestrian walkway, no arrests, just a peaceful march over the bridge. But others wanted to loudly flaunt the rules and make a scene.

The whole thing illustrated a truism of any social movement. When there's not unity within, it's easier for the enemies of the movement to break it apart. In this case, the lack of unity made the protesters vulnerable to manipulation by the police, which Occupiers say tricked them into getting kettled.

But if the police thought that arresting seven hundred people would weaken the Occupy movement, they were wrong. The mass arrests made global news and raised Occupy's profile even more. the pepper spray video, it sparked another wave of newcomers, and in a big tent movement without leaders, well, there's bound to be infighting.

It's funny because at the very beginning, we should have just threw them out of the park. 

This is Detective Rick Lee. In 2011, he was an NYPD community affairs detective in Precinct One, which includes the financial district and Zuccotti Park. He said the NYPD initially held back because it's not city property.

In fact, Zuccotti Park is what is called a privately owned public space, which means it's owned by a private entity, in this case, a company called Brookfield Properties, but it's legally required to remain open to the public. 

Because there were no written legal notices as to the rules of Zuccotti Park, we as the police couldn't kick them out, nor could Brookfield press charges against them.

So it was months of back and forth between lawyers, not only Brookfield, NYPD, but the Occupy lawyers. 

In the meantime, as a community affairs officer, Detective Lee's job was to be the pleasant middleman. 

We are the liaison between the precinct and the community. Normally, when people demonstrate, we have a meeting, and we go over the rules of engagement, basically.

And I would give them a permit. The Occupiers didn't go through that process. 

Right. One important tenet of the whole movement was that you don't ask permission. You claim space and invite people to join you. 

So when they occupied Zuccotti Park, I was down there to find out what's going on. What is their angle, so to speak?

He was out there poking around pretty much every day. And this is important, he was a plainclothes detective, meaning he didn't wear a cop uniform. 

I, I have always had a reputation of no one realizes I'm a cop because of the way I dress. I'm big into clothes, always have been. Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Brooks Brothers, J.

Crew, stuff that. I used to wear a lot of tweed. Occupy was mainly in the fall and the winter, so I didn't get to my linen suits when, with Occupy. 

In early October, a few weeks into the occupation, some occupiers realized Detective Lee was a police officer. They dubbed him Hipster Cop. On blogs and message boards, they shared photos of him in his cardigans and skinny ties, both making fun of him and warning one another not to get too cozy with him.

E- every time I showed up at Zuccotti Park, someone would stop and start the people's mic saying, "Hello, Hipster Cop." 

GQ actually published an interview with Detective Lee, along with a photo of the 45-year-old posing at Zuccotti Park in a quilted jacket, pink shirt, and striped tie. In the interview, he described his look as more country gentleman than hipster, which I think is about right.

It's fair to say that in the realm of invisible to visible tactics, this launched Detective Lee into the very visible category. He went from secretly gathering information to becoming good PR for the NYPD. 

The New York Times picked it up, and Associated Press picked it up, was because it was this positive spin on the whole thing.

Here's this cop that dresses well, who's down there trying to relate to all the occupiers and that thing. 

The NYPD truly needed some good PR after multiple videos of cops violently arresting peaceful protesters had traveled around the internet. As Detective Lee tells it, all the NYPD had been doing was trying to ensure the day-to-day safety of everyone involved.

We are there to protect the occupiers for their right to demonstrate, freedom of speech. We're also there to protect Brookfield Properties. We're there to protect the people walking on the sidewalks. 

Something else he said, though, showed that there were other motives for the large police presence at the park.

If you're gonna pay $5 million for a loft, and you look out your window, and there's this occupy in Zuccotti Park, you're gonna be "What the hell is going on here?" 

Police are often criticized for focusing more on protecting wealthy people's quality of life and real estate values than poor people's.

It's a consumer mentality. If you pay more, you should get more for what is supposed to be a public service. Although Detective Lee had been outed as a cop, there were undercover officers who stayed more hidden. 

NYPD intel had cops who went undercover in Zuccotti Park. It's their job to basically find out what's, what's going on with this.

Is it gonna be just a peaceful demonstration, or, or are they looking to do violence? 

I'll come back to that question of violence. But for now, let's stay with the undercover cops who weren't being scouted by GQ. Remember Manissa, the Occupy supporter who halted a giant general assembly meeting to change the declaration's wording about race?

She had joined the POC group at Occupy and became a regular at the park. One day, she invited her brother to join her at a protest. 

He is, an Indian man in New York City, and so post 9/11, my brother started being stopped all the time in New York City by cops, just, straight up racial profiling after 9/11.

So he has a lot of experience with cops, is what I'm trying to say. and he came to a protest, and he was "I gotta get out of here." And I was "What's wrong?" And he was "Ju- too many cops here." And I was "Yeah, there's a lot of cops policing the protest." And he was "No, there's too many cops in the crowd."

And I was "What do you mean?" And he was "There are cops everywhere in the crowd." And then I was "Show me." 

They started looking around the crowd, and he pointed someone out to her. 

My brother was "Cops always are wearing these, baggy jeans and, a sweatshirt or whatever, but they always get the shoes wrong.

They're still wearing cop shoes." And cops, they can't wear sneakers on the job, so it's, an outfit that you would be wearing sneakers with, only you're wearing weird black loafers. And he showed me, and then I was "Oh my God, you're right. There are cops everywhere." 

They had been there the whole time.

That beautiful inclusiveness that had allowed Manissa to step in on her first day at Occupy and alter the declaration, the inclusiveness that welcomed anyone off the street to address the crowds of hundreds of people, well, that day at the protest with her brother, Manissa realized that inclusiveness also meant infiltrators were welcomed in, along with everyone else.

This guy came up to us, and he was an undercover cop, and he was "Yeah, do you, know where this protest is heading?" And I was "No, I don't know." And my brother just, turned his back on him, and somebody else, jumped in and was "Oh yeah, do you wanna get involved? we're gonna do this and this and this."

And I had this moment where I was "Oh my God." there were a lot of, really earnest college kids who really, really wanted other kinds of people to be involved. And so, a burly working class-looking white guy, you're "Oh, we wanna include you." And I was "But that guy is a cop," 

It's not surprising that there were undercover officers, but the level of law enforcement interest in Occupy was unusual. The true depths of the police infiltration and surveillance wouldn't be fully revealed until years later, when one organization got its hands on what would come to be called the Spy Files.

The general assembly meetings, where everyone got a chance to speak, were supposed to help sort out all of these different opinions.

They were supposed to result in consensus, but- 

there was a lot of fighting. 

That's Brooke Lehman, who you heard in episode two. She's a longtime anarchist activist and a member of one of the most famous banking families in America. She'd been leading workshops on direct democracy in Zuccotti Park. She thought that the general assemblies needed to have more structure.

I also w- looked at this form of direct democracy, where literally anyone could come off the street and share, as not a particularly effective structure for what was then becoming clear, that we were about to, we were running an occupation, where thousands of people were getting fed and housed, and streets were needing to be cleaned, porta potties were needing to be acquired.

All these things that were really mechanical needs needed some form of coordination, and I brought up the idea of having a spokescouncil in addition to the general assembly, which will go down in my own personal history as my worst idea ever. 

The idea was to have regular spokescouncil meetings where logistical and budgetary decisions would be made.

These meetings would be separate from the giant general assemblies. The structure would be a wagon wheel. Each working group would select a spoke to sit in the middle of the circle with the other spokes. All the other working group members would sit behind their spoke. The spokes would act as delegates for their group, not to make decisions on their behalf, just to be the voice explaining what their group's needs were.

It was a structure that had been successful in several other movements Brooke had participated in over the years, but it didn't work so well at Occupy. 

Because it was not only, a, just an unbelievable amount of labor to get this, this idea passed, but it was seen as such an affront to the, to folks that were very attached to the general assembly.

It was as though we were bringing in, a foreign army to take over Occupy Wall Street, bringing in this second layer of organizational structure. And then both the spokescouncil and the general assembly ca- became what I can only refer to as a Jerry Springer Show, where people literally used to show up just to watch the fights happen.

It was ... And it was traumatic. I consider myself a pretty seasoned facilitator, and I could not facilitate the spokescouncil after a while. I would literally shake. my hands would be shaking. And I laugh because Occupy Wall Street was a bit of a train wreck. It was, it was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck.

Brooke says there was one thing that caused more arguments than anything else. 

So we were a movement for economic justice that spent most of our nights fighting over money, which is just absurd on so many different levels, and some of the decisions were wise, and some of them were to give, I, I don't know how much money Occupy Wall Street spent on cigarettes over that, the course of that occupation.

But, it was messy. 

The Occupy kitchen had been accepting food donations from day one. People would show up with pizza, bagels, boxes of produce, and supporters across the country paid for local restaurants to deliver food to the encampment. There was actually a wave of media stories about how well the occupiers were eating, including a New York Post article that mocked a chef who brought salmon cakes and quinoa salad to the park.

So yes, the occupiers were eating well because so many people wanted to feed them. But the kitchen also accepted money for food. Pretty quickly, they had way more money than they knew what to do with. Here's Chris G from the kitchen working 

group. Kitchen, at the beginning, it was the only place people could go to donate, and so I was watching that thing just go from, 1,200, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000.

I'm watching it happen before my eyes. And because we were the only ones that had that money, a lot of people began coming up to me, this is early on in the occupation, just said, "Look, we need money for these sleeping bags. We need money for underwear, for these socks, for these tents," stuff that, 

It started with sleeping bags, but they needed all kinds of stuff. Brooms and laundry money to keep things clean, money to print the Occupied Wall Street newspaper that had sprung up, money to buy or replace tech equipment for the livestream working group, bandages, gloves, and blood pressure pumps for the medic tent.

A finance working group was formed to figure out how to manage the money, and there was a lot of it to manage. Pretty quickly, Occupy had almost half a million dollars in the bank. People all over the nation were giving small donations at breakneck speed. It was an incredible show of support, but it was also a curse.

Once the money was being handled separately from the kitchen, a shift happened. 

I began noticing a difference between what might colloquially be called the front of the house staff and the back of the house staff. There were the people who generally had been more upper middle class, generally whiter, generally more educated, and they were the ones who were talking to suppliers and vendors.

They were the ones, doing communications and outreach. they were the ones meeting with potential donors and, and things that. 

He wasn't the only one who noticed it. The Daily Show senior correspondent Samantha Bee did a segment about divisions within Zuccotti Park. In 2011, Samantha Bee was probably the most prominent woman in the world of political satire.

Occupy Wall Street, it was born out of the loftiest of ambitions. 

We're trying to build a new society. 

As it dragged on, the movement had been in danger of becoming the very thing it was fighting against. 

The more people that came, the more people kinda segregated into, their own little groups.

The park just split in half. 

Samantha Bee interviewed several men that she was clearly amused by, one with a faux hawk and green Che Guevara-style shirt, another with a hipster scarf who said he didn't keep track of time anymore, and a guy who said everyone should have access to technology but wouldn't share his iPad.

They described how the park was divided into an uptown 

area and a ghetto. 

Up there is, where the college hipsters that live in Brooklyn, go and, try to rule the park from, And down here, it's more of the poor people's encampment, and, that is contentious. 

Occupy Wall Street was divided by class.

On the one side, the elites with their library, Apple pop-up store, and bike-powered espresso machines. On the other, the downwardly mobile with their drum circles. 

It wasn't just the critique from outsiders. A lot of diehard Occupiers were both thrilled to be part of the movement and uncomfortable with the power dynamics within it.

Occupy's official structure was horizontalism, which meant it was supposed to be leaderless, without a hierarchy. 

It wasn't horizontal. 

This is Nicole Carty. She grew up in Atlanta, very aware of the structural inequalities around her. 

My family has a history of social activism, social justice. My dad grew up during Jim Crow.

you can't, or at least I couldn't really grow up in Atlanta without being aware of inequality and differences, and I was a very, justice-oriented, weirdly political kid. And I went to a really progressive school, but even amongst that population, activism was pretty unheard of. I think you have to understand that, in 2010, 2011, there weren't social movements.

There weren't young people out being active, caring loudly about issues. I tried to do student organizing and campus organizing, and I noticed how unpopular it was. Nobody cared. 

She graduated college in 2010 and moved to New York, ready to hang up her college activist hat and find a real job. But then she heard about the young women who were pepper sprayed, and she started following Occupy on Twitter and watching the Occupy livestream.

I remember those first live streams were, I feel they had a really intentional effort to just put the most charismatic young people on screen to, walk you through the occupation, to go past the kitchen, and talk about how the park was organized. And I'd never seen young people my age care about inequality publicly.

She showed up with some friends on the day of the Brooklyn Bridge march to join in. 

We just perched up on the pedestrian side and looked over, and watched them close down and, trap 700 people on the bridge. 

Later, she met Nalini and a bunch of others at one of the Irish pubs that dot the Financial District, and joined the facilitation working group.

Nicole returned day after day, totally inspired. 

It felt we were going to dismantle capitalism in, the next week, and it felt amazing to be at the park. It was everybody who you didn't know existed but who felt the same way was finding each other. You were meeting new, young people who cared about what you cared about.

I'd never been part of such a, transformative, special, utopian space in my life. And so I was pretty hooked. 

But she also started noticing the power dynamics at play in this growing little society of Occupy. 

There's the formal infrastructure, then there's the informal infrastructure. 

She saw that some working groups seemed to have more power than others.

The finance working group, for example. 

Nicole also felt some decisions weren't being made by consensus in the general assembly. 

The direct action working group, all the, sexy, young anarchists, I don't know, they were all sleeping with each other, and they would make decisions around what actions were gonna happen, and not consult other people.

And then there were some actual indoor meeting spaces just off Zuccotti Park, including a public atrium in the Deutsche Bank building. Not everyone knew about these indoor meeting spaces, which seemed to be the real centers of power. 

I, walk into this meeting room, and I'm- there's, three people at the front of the room, and I'm "Oh, this is where the decisions are getting made.

Obviously, this is where the, the real power hub of the occupation is." It was, all of, the big players from across the facilitation working group, but lots of people who weren't in working groups, who were just shaping the political message of the occupation. This was not a general assembly.

This was, a need-to-know only meeting, but there were probably, 50 people in the bigger, broader room, and these folks were in the center of it. 

Nicole noted all of this not exactly to call people out for doing anything wrong, but to critique the structure a bit in a way that I think can be beneficial to anyone who's trying to create a non-hierarchical movement now.

It wasn't horizontal. It wasn't horizontal. there's a really good short essay called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" that I became acquainted with at the time of this occupation, and what it essentially says is that if you don't have structures, no structure, and, Occupy had, fake structures, but if you don't have structures, you're gonna actually reproduce the same inequalities that exist in the world.

And so because we're all horizontal, it's flat, there's just this one broad structure, we're making decisions together, allegedly. It was structurelessness, and what that meant was that, it was people who were, politically connected, charismatic, had outside connections to, other political players in New York or nationally that were really making the decisions.

Anyone who has studied the history of, quote-unquote, "law enforcement," the FBI, and police agencies in the United States in the context of progressive social justice organizing understands that law enforcement's role has historically been to repress progressive movements, and it has done so quite actively and frequently f- quite viciously.

This is Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a co-founder of Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a nonprofit legal organization. 

A lot of our work focuses at the intersection of First and Fourth Amendment rights, so support to, movement organizing and activists around the United States, and also in conjunction with law enforcement oppression against movements.

Mara's organization suspected that the FBI was tracking Occupy activists across the nation, and they were right. They filed records requests that eventually turned up more than 4,000 pages of heavily redacted government documents that showed that the FBI had been monitoring the Occupy movement since it was just a meme on the internet.

What we found was that the FBI had begun coordinating, surveilling, monitoring, tracking Occupy activity a month before the first tent ever even went up in Zuccotti Park. So as early as August 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange, with banks, with Wall Street to discuss potential Occupy Wall Street protests that weren't even going to manifest for another month.

What was especially concerning to Mara was that the documents revealed a high level of coordination between the corporations that Occupiers were criticizing and the FBI. 

Their focus was on meeting with business, meeting with the political objects of the protests. 

The financial services industry had an obvious interest in quieting Occupy activists who were criticizing their practices, their profits, and their outsized political influence, and they had a direct line to the FBI and DHS through something called the Domestic Security Alliance Council.

Which the federal government describes as a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector. 

Today, membership in the Domestic Security Alliance Council is restricted to for-profit companies that, quote, "generate a minimum of $2 billion in annual US revenue," end quote.

Federal law enforcement agencies were treating the Occupy movement as a potential terrorist threat, but Mara believes the actual threat they were concerned about had nothing to do with violence. 

Any disruption to capitalism in the United States, to the way that the US government, the businesses, and the corporations, and corporate power in the United States function, is considered a threat to the structure of the United States.

So it's not about, again, terrorism threats, threats of violence, it's about threats to economic structure and to corporate power in the United States. That's what these documents very clearly reveal. 

This coordination between corporate businesses and federal law enforcement was happening nationally. As occupations continued popping up in cities and towns around the US, the FBI-joined terrorism task force partners, including the NYPD, were identifying and surveilling specific activists.

We do not have the names of those individuals, but people within those movements can identify themselves. 

They sure can. Here's Sandy, the direct action team member who had helped plan the somewhat disastrous Brooklyn Bridge march. 

I had cops come to my house. I had vans follow me around my block. Someone that I had started to see romantically, when they got arrested, it turned out they were on, a domestic joint terrorism watch force list.

Marissa, the earnest Midwestern anarchist who helped organize Occupy, she would later realize she was on an FBI list, and one of the live streamers was told at some point that he was being investigated by the FBI as well. According to Mara, law enforcement agents were doing more than just keeping tabs on people.

They were borrowing from the playbook of COINTELPRO, the FBI's Cold War era counterintelligence program. COINTELPRO sought to undermine the civil rights, Black liberation, and Puerto Rican independence movements by sowing division and disruption. Although it was shut down in the 1970s, Mara believes law enforcement used similar tactics against Occupy, working to weaken the movement from within by fostering distrust, paranoia, and conflict.

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force's coordination creates a way for the FBI to routinely use local police agencies or private sector operatives as a proxy force. And in that way, infiltrators, undercover operatives routinely go into movement spaces and did throughout Occupy. And Occupy, because of its open nature, created a very fertile ground for infiltration and for disruption.

It was that problem of structurelessness. 

When you have no accountability and just an endless open process, that's just a gift to the government and a gift to corporate infiltration and police infiltration, and, it would appear that that was certainly taken advantage of. 

Sometimes an occupier would throw out an idea or argue a point that seemed potentially destructive, but when everyone was trying so hard to be radically inclusive and there were no set leaders, what do you do?

Here's Sandy again. 

Somebody showed up and decided they wanted to lead a march, and we don't know who this person is. We don't know what everybody's agenda is coming in. We don't know who is a informant. We don't know, we don't know any- anybody as far as we could throw them, and yet we are here talking about planning actions together.

People were already sleeping poorly. There was already a lot of infighting. So when Occupiers started to recognize that undercover cops and informants were in their midst, it fueled some serious paranoia. Was the Occupier who argued every point at a meeting just annoying, or an informant trying to cause chaos?

Some people wondered, only half-jokingly, whether the drummers in the drum circle were intentionally trying to sabotage the occupation. 

The fucking drum circle, was creating a huge political problem for us because everyone was complaining who lived near the occupation. 

Drumming aside, it truly was difficult to know who to trust, and maybe worse, what if someone thought you were an informant?

It was Detective Lee, hipster cop, of all people, who got into Nalini's head. 

Freaking hipster cop. Hipster cop had this, this whole look. It's he had a starter pack and, wore it, and he was trying to really be nice to everybody, and I was "I don't trust you 'cause that's some psyop stuff."

I was "That is some psychological warfare you're trying to do with coming out here looking a hipster," which many people in the park were. There were a lot of times he would just give me a head nod. That's that is psychological stuff where, 'cause then if he gives me a head nod, if I give him a head nod, I'm acknowledging it.

I'm not gonna give him a head nod, but if I don't give him a head nod, I, I, I could be hiding something for the rest of the people in the park. they did some real, real internal strife stuff. 

Her paranoia made sense. 

A month into the occupation, one Occupy participant accidentally revealed that he was a volunteer spy.

He had gotten access to an internal email list of Occupiers and had been forwarding thousands of email exchanges, not only to the NYPD and FBI, but also to Andrew Breitbart, the far-right blogger. The paranoia crept up as the days wore on, and the exhausted Occupiers tried to run a small village, spread their anti-capitalist message, and protect themselves from arrests and police violence.

But the energy was still high, and they were shockingly still there in the park, hundreds of them. Despite the behind-the-scenes efforts that seemed aimed at squashing the movement, city officials were publicly giving lip service to the rights of the Occupiers to protest.

Next, Section B, INEQUALITY'S LONG HISTORY

And you point out that some suggest that people, should, possess equal rights before the law, and that as long as they do, any degree of material hierarchy is acceptable. others, have argued that legal and civil society can be dispensed with as well. The common thread that runs through the thinking of the anti-egalitarians is that they see material and economic inequality as not only inevitable, but something to celebrate.

Yeah. How likely are equal rights before the law in a system of extreme economic inequality? 

Yeah. Well, I think that's a great question, too, and it's something, i- in talking about this book- and the arguments in it, and also in reading the different thinkers that I engaged with in working on it, you do see...

one theme that you see is the idea that, equality of opportunity is, that's really the American promise. But equality of outcome, which is usually thought to mean going in to determine what, what people's wages will be or to, to more directly affect the distribution of resources, that that's really, that's going too far, and that is, manipulation of the market and undemocratic and ultimately will lead to political control in, in lots of ways.

And I think, a- and then I think the, and the idea that really what Jefferson and other architects of the United States meant was they wanted to see people have equal rights before the law and, no privileged caste in the way that an aristocracy would be. But after that, people are just, the, the, an actual material wealth doesn't, the, the, it doesn't matter.

or it's not, or at least it doesn't, it doesn't ha- it doesn't affect that underlying equality. And I think that that one... I, I think you can make that argument in the abstract, but one thing that I was very struck by in working on this book is that it seems to be hard for people who are arguing, I, in, in principle, I suppo- you could have legal and civic equality coexisting with massive economic inequality.

But many of the people who wind up defending massive economic inequality do not do so by reiterating the value of, one person, one vote, or equality before the law. No, they tend to pretty quickly go to a set of arguments about how actually there are underlying differences between people that determine their place in the s- in the economic order, and that perhaps also ought to determine their place in the political order.

And I think, the m- the, the, there's different, versions of this argument. The most, disconcerting and the most hard-edged are, are the ones associated with scientific racism, which flourishes in the first two decades of the 20th century. And I write a bit about two people in particular, the journalist, Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, and also Madison Grant, both of whom were based in New York City, and both of whom really argue for, w- put

Or at the forefront of a much larger group of quite elite individuals arguing that society really is stratified by racial and biological types that are distinct from each other, and that are, that, that, that were, were some types, Nordic as they would put it, are at the top of this pyramid, and, followed by Mediterranean, as they put it again, and Slav, and then Asiatics and Africans at the bottom.

And, That these are really basically different types of people. And I, I think th- so I... And, and they, they, they should occupy different positions in the social order. So I think one thing that is, is quite, another theme that runs through this book is actually is, I, I guess it's the, one of the problems for democracy of tolerating extreme economic hierarchy or inequality is that it becomes very fertile ground for the development of a whole set of ideas justifying that inequality, which have their own pernicious political life.

so that people really don't say, "Well, everybody..." They, they, they run very quickly towards justifying, political exclusion And subordination alongside economic hierarchy. Economic ineq- economic 

inequality spreads social inequality- Yeah ... correct? 

E- yeah. Economic inequality spreads social inequality, and it helps to nurture ideas that defend such social inequality, often in ways that are really extraordinarily ugly and, destructive- 

So do-

of, 

of the social fabric ... 

does science matter to those who believe in this biological inferiority? Is there proof, the anec- anecdotal evidence they see around themselves of economic inequality- Right ... is economic inequality proof of biological superiority- Right ... and inferiority? 

Yeah, I think obviously in any real scientific sense, not at all, but I do think that...

And, and it- it's interesting, in the early 20th century, there was a whole, the whole idea of scientific racism, i- is a elaborate set of ideas that has actually really very little scientific weight behind it in terms of, the, there is... It, it's really a set of claims that are not justified by anything that we would recognize as science, and part of the reason for the decline of scientific racism was, the, not just the, the...

People, people became more aware of the political dangers in the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of Nazism, but also just the scientific consensus moves against it. so I think it's a, it's, th- yeah, the, the way that science is used here, the people who are using scientific ideas to justify inequality are usually using science in a very selective and, deceptive way, and they're drawing on the idea of science without actually the the, the practice of science or scientific experimentation, scientific knowledge behind it.

when Jefferson wrote about this idea about all men created equal, Jefferson is not thinking that all people are exactly the same.

He isn't putting forth a declaration about what all people should have materially. this is a society that has been structured through inequality and hierarchy of all different kinds, obviously enslaved and free, but also there are plenty of unfree workers, indentured servants who are not subject to hereditary slavery, but nonetheless have limited freedom.

Obviously, men and women have radically different rights. The language is there, but it also is against a backdrop of a society that is much more hierarchically structured, and also in which there are deep traditions of what some historians have described as a deferential culture, the sense that the society should be organized along superiors who owe certain things to the inferiors, and in, in, in return for which they are entitled to expect a certain deference from those inferiors This statement is, heavily qualified in lots of ways.

Nonetheless, it provides a, a template. It throws down a gauntlet and a set of claims about equality that other people are able to take up and, and quickly do. And in some ways, the entire set of events around the American Revolution have within them, it is a popular mobilization. People quickly attack not just the king and colonial dependence, but all kinds of other dependencies in society.

There is a real... Certainly in, in New York City, this is the case. There's a popular radicalism that emerges in the city and a sense of, real class antagonism as people mobilize around the revolutionary cause. Slavery is challenged in different ways during the war, both by enslaved people themselves and even among slaveholders, some of whom decide to emancipate the people that they own in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Old traditions around primogeniture are discarded in the context of the war. And then after the war, as the new nation tries to consolidate itself, there continue to be popular mobilizations and uprisings, the most famous of which is Shays' Rebellion, the Debtors' Rebellion in Massachusetts. There are ways in which the experience of the revolution and the ideas around it give rise to a sensibility that is really very skeptical, very critical, very hostile towards hierarchy and towards inherited hierarchy in particular The idea that some people just have the right to control social resources and exercise political power.

But then you have people like, Madison who are alarmed by this and wanna rein it in, and devise a constitution that does rein it in. Absolutely. And, and obviously lots of historians have, written about the conflicts in the early Republic and the Constitution, and the ways in which the Constitution is justified in part as an effort to retain and regain social order, and to create certain kinds of checks on democratic political power.

The book, starts with a discussion of some of the tendencies that have come down to us since that time, and it, it starts in particular with a little discussion of John Adams, who is an interesting figure in the constellation of the, the Founding Fathers, or the, the people who wrote and thought and talked and led the movement for independence.

Adams was different than some of the other people who I discuss in this book. Many of the, the figures in this book are, are conflicted about elements of their own arguments, but Adams more so than most. Adams, I think, is, is not... He rarely presents himself the way that many later figures do as simply arguing in defense of inequality and hierarchy.

But what he is is very, very deeply ambivalent about the egalitarian claims that he thinks someone like Jefferson is making, and that he perceives percolating through the country, and then eventually taken up in the French Revolution, about which he's horrified. Like any good conservative . Like any good conservative, the French Revolution is really where things always, that, that's where things end up, and that's where you don't wanna go.

And, you have to think about how to organize your society to avoid winding up there. And i- in, in some ways there's something, I think, appealing about Adams, because he does write with a certain realism about- political power and wealth. He says, you might say that everybody is created equal, but really people are not equal in society.

Some people have more wealth and more power than others, and that makes it possible for them to get a certain education and training, which in turn gives them a certain capacity to rule, that the 99% of laboring humanity, as he puts it, will never be able to attain and therefore shouldn't really have.

He's conflicted about what political theory should be delegated to that mass of the laboring population, as he would put it. And for Adams, it's less a full-throated defense of this and more trying to say this is how things are and we have to accommodate that. And if you don't, you will unleash these passions of equality that can become very dangerous for the stability of the society as a whole.

I was interested, in, you wrote a bit about the mudsill theory, which was new on me. The theory that, there must be a, a lower class for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. And this idea was developed by a Southern planter. But it reminded me of something that John Maynard Keynes, who is usually considered a liberal, said of Marxism.

"How can I adopt a creed which preferring the mud to the fish exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?" These sorts of attitudes do, cross the political spectrum, don't they?

Yeah. I guess one of the things that I was interested in in looking at this reservoir of ideas was looking at, a way of thinking about the world that does cross political boundaries or what we think of as the traditional political boundaries, the liberal conservative spectrum. And one of the things that I was interested in this is what are the conditions under which people come to accept extraordinary levels of economic inequality in particular.

And part of that is the people who have really mobilized around it are doing so against a, a, a a background of ideas that are, people hold them selectively, but they are present not just in one part of the social structure. That said, I think Keynes is picking up on this from aristocratic aspects of his own background and- Educational upbringing in particular at Cambridge.

So he is tapping into... that's one of the... It's just always funny about Keynes in general. We think of Keynes as being the person who helped to found modern economic liberalism, but he, in a lot of ways, is drawing on a set of values inculcated by a social order and vision that predates capitalism.

All those Bloomsbury elitists. Yeah, very elitist. Very... And, Roosevelt also ha- has this... Keynes is not just the noblesse oblige, but the, the, a set of values that go beyond profit, and his whole aesthetic, artistic, Bloomsbury, modernist sensibility.

Have we democratically chosen inequality even if we didn't recognize that we were democratically choosing inequality? For instance, by voting for tax cuts that might- Mm-hmm ... lead to more greater inequality. So have we, e- and even liberals have voted for tax cuts, we know that. So have we democratically chosen, the situation that we found ourselves in?

Have we democratically chosen inequality even by promoting or, supporting policies that we didn't recognize would lead to inequality? 

yeah, I think it, it just in some ways you could, in some ways you could say that, and I think there's another way in which, this is another, certainly another idea that, that if, if the, and someone like Milton Friedman actually advances a version of this set of claims that, sometimes people who are not especially wealthy might endorse ideas of a, of, of a say, say that extreme inequality is okay because you always think that you might be able to be the one who comes out on top.

You always think you might be the able to be the one who is the winner. and so you don't, it, it, the existence of an unequal social order is only a problem if it shuts you out from the get-go. If you think you can rise up within it, why would you not, wanna have your chance to participate in the race like everybody else?

that's one of the, things that Milton Friedman, for example, says, and this is... So it's a a populist defense of inequality, that you see circulating out there. And you poi- you- and also I guess, the, the idea that inequality maybe is good because if the people, p- the people who are winning are doing or making or presenting something that everybody else wants, and that's part of what feeds, what leads them to succeed is they're actually giving people something that they want.

and so, again, why does it matter? Why does this inequality matter if people are getting to watch the show or buy the car or whatever it is that the wealthy are producing? 

Everybody wants to be on the life- lifestyles of the rich and famous apparently. 

Exactly, yeah. 

You, you write, "They have also sought to affect our politics in more direct and immediate ways.

Traditional corporate lobbying has grown in Washington, D.C. and in state capitals alike. Businessmen and wealthy individuals pour money into political campaigns and try to sway elections. They use their resources to fight unions when workers try to organize them. No matter how many such organizations they might seem to have already, business leaders still start new ones such as the Rockbridge Network, founded in 2019 by J.D.

Vance and venture capitalist Christopher, Buskirk. Rockbridge, draws on the wealth of Silicon Valley moguls to advance a new agenda for the Republican Party, one that embraces the idea that a new business, quote-unquote, 'aristocracy,' or quote, 'A p- proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers,' as Buskirk puts it, should be in control."

Mm-hmm. How aware, how, how straightforward is the Re- Republican Party, when it comes to telling their rank and file that the party's platform is now bringing about a new aristocracy controlled by Silicon Valley- ... fueled by data centers and taxpayer money? 

right. I think, yeah, no, well, it's funny 'cause I, I think at, at this moment in history, so just going up to the present, this is a really weird moment because

because there are more people in the Republican Party who I think are actually literally saying that more openly than in the past. I think there is... A- a- and also some of the, the tech moguls and intellectuals associated with them are much more confident in jettisoning even lip service to ideas about equality than at earlier moments in American history.

and so in some ways, I think at the beginning we were talking about the tension where the the overt ideology of the country is that all men are created equal, and then there's this transgressive counter-tradition arguing against that. Well, today, I think there is this strain, and it's not everybody, or not even all parts of the Republican Party, but increasingly there is a, a a current that really just openly rejects some of these ideas and says, "Well, monarchy maybe would be better," that you should govern the country the way you govern a corporation, and that means venerating the founder and giving the founder the control that they need to make the decisions that are really in everybody's best interests.

it's, it's a... I don't have a complete... I, I don't have a a comprehensive argument about why this is happening in this particular way right now, but I do think it's happening, and I think it's, it's quite notable. And, I would have to say I think it is associated with the the real material inequality that we see.

It doesn't seem like a coincidence that we see these ideas gaining traction in the same moment that has led to the emergence, at least briefly, of the first trillionaire in world history, and where you, you actually do have this group of people who have just an extraordinary degree of wealth and power and also, technological change that is in the hands of extraordinary, of, of a really very small number of people relative to the impact that the changes it brings about, can and will have.

So yeah, I think it's, I don't, I don't think the Republican Party is especially open about this element of its politics, but what is strange is that it's more open than it might have been at many earlier points. And I think that in itself is a problem and, And that it is quite important for people to make the argument against it, to defend ideals of equality and their, relationship to democracy and the, the reality, I think, that people actually, common, ordinary people, the mass of the citizenry, is actually much better able to determine its interests and its-- to understand what, to come to some democratic self-government than a small group of people governing with little sense of input or accountability from those whose, lives are affected by their choices.

So I, I think it, it is a moment to really put the egalitarian gauntlet down again and to, kinda compel people in power, if they really don't believe in that, that they should have to say so clearly and, yeah, for people to be able to evaluate the arguments more fully. 

The utopian v- vision of absolute equality of property is the nightmare that frightens those who oppose equality, insisting that any attempt at equality is a slippery slope toward absolute equality of property.

Why is that nightmare so effective at striking fears in the public about campaigns for greater equality and opposed to growing inequality? 

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I, I think actually, so i- in American history, I think people who have really made the case for absolute equality are far and few between.

That has not been, y- y- you can be against extreme inequality, against hierarchy, without saying that actually everybody has to have exactly the same property and consumer goods. I, I just think people, that argument has not been r- for better or worse, whatever people might think of it, it has not been really the framework that people have argued in, in this country or, actually in, in other countries as well.

So I think it is a straw man and a, ... And, and yeah, it's obvious why people would be scared of that because it implies that you might lose something, that equality doesn't mean that you're gaining anything. It just suggests that someone's gonna come in and take away things that you have in an effort to enforce some idea of equality that you aren't really part of or part of formulating.

so I think it actually, it, I, I don't think that that's actually what, what, what anybody wants. But i- it's interesting, when you see this come forth... So I live in New York, and we've been recently having a whole, set of debates about the second home, the second luxury homes tax, the pied-à-terre tax.

And the idea is k- that there might be a additional tax on people who own second homes in the city that are worth more than a certain amount, and that by taxing those homes, that property in particular, you could raise money for a public good, in this case, broader, early childhood education And I think people have been, th- this new tax which has passed and now is in the process of people figuring out how to implement it, has met with enormous hostility and resentment and anger and a sense of being targeted, and, and a lot of claims about the dangers of equality that go with it.

But it's very, it's very much worth noting that nobody is even taking away the second homes. Nobody is redistributing this, these, these luxury properties. all they are doing is trying to create... Y- you're looking at the resources that are available and thinking about ways that you could create a, the, the revenue base to support a new public good, that would actually be a support for, many, many people in the city.

so I think this is this is the actual contest about equality and inequality, not the abstract idea of should we all have the exact same goods. n- nobody has really been involved in making that argument. So it just, it, it's just a specter that is used to frighten people, not something that is really has substance to it, I 

think.

Do you think affordability obfuscates equality? 

the lang- the political language of affordability? 

Yeah. 

Yeah. I, I think it's a, it's a... I, I, I think that the, I, I, I actually, I think, I think that the, the framework of affordability, It, it captures some things, but not others because, I, I think a lot of what people are upset about in, i- is not just a sense of consumer- of, of things being too expensive, it's a sense of not having enough power in your life.

So the problem with rent, for example, is not just that it's high, which it is, but also that it is unpredictable and that you cannot control when or whether your landlord raises your rent or how much they raise it if you're in an, a apartment that has no rent control or regulation. And I think that that, and, and similarly, I think at work, a- and this is maybe the biggest problem with ideas about, with the, with the framework of affordability is that it doesn't talk enough about what makes things affordable or not is not just what they cost in the store, but how much you are paid, and that in turn reflects a whole set of questions about how your work is valued and whether you can affect what you're paid at all through a union or through different kinds of political negotiation.

So I think that the i- affordability, I, I think is a, it's a perfectly usef- the, the, it does get at something. and I have no problem with it as a political language, but I also think it, it doesn't fully capture the range of issues that are at stake for people and what people are talking about when they talk about the problems of life in a city like New York or Chicago today.

Let's talk about the, the period of meritocracy, the '50s, '60s, when, liberals in a lot of cases, embraced testing, SATs, that thing, in order to come up with a society where the winners were sorted out on the basis of merit, not inherited wealth or privilege or anything like that. And they ignore the fact that the word meritocracy was coined by a s- a satirist.

That was a period where they, I don't know, they're trying to make a, a good hierarchy instead of a bad hierarchy? Earlier in the century, we see these defenses of hierarchy that are either based on a sense that it's economically necessary or that it's yielding the best and the brightest at the top through sheer force of competition, or that it's economic inequality and the concentration of wealth is essential because otherwise you won't be able to fund major philanthropic institutions like universities or museums.

You see the scientific racist arguments about how the material distribution of wealth echoes what is the underlying inequality between people. So I think in the post-war years, you find a different set of ideas coming to the fore, and yes, it is this sense of wanting to find a metric, a neutral way of measuring humanity, and then slotting people into the appropriate places in a stable bureaucratic order.

Or perhaps also placing them into educational institutions. And it is interesting that you see this, these things developing in tandem. This is the moment of the great expansion of post-war, higher education. And you see that growing at the same time is this interest in finding a way to put people in the right place in the system via a standard that's supposed to be totally neutral, the SAT.

Some idea, some hope that you could create this test that would find the, the smartest people, and then you could just put them at the top of this structure. Now, as anybody who has ever engaged with the SAT knows, this is a really utopian way to view the SAT, and it does not take account of the deep differences between educational institutions and, d- just all the different, ways in which this is really a fantasy in its own right.

But yes, this is something that liberals in particular ... I talk a bit about this guy, John Gardner, in the book, who was involved with ETS, the company that makes the SATs. He later served in the Johnson administration. He founded Common Cause. he, he's really a liberal, but he's very interested in this question.

He writes a book called Excellence. can we be equal and excellent also, and h- how do you do that? This is a place where there's a lot of investment among the post-war liberals themselves in this idea about creating a true system of merit. Okay, and then there's this backlash. The neoconservatives, Irving Kristol, blame, this, this lust for equality on envy, the envy of the intellectuals for the successful.

And then we start seeing the rise, or revival of some old genetic theories of human intelligence, that are often quite racist. And then, 20, 25 years later, we see, Herrnstein and Murray publish The Bell Curve in a world which had become much, much more unequal than we saw that original backlash.

So yeah, what about this, this new backlash trend? Yeah, in the late '60s, early '70s, you start to see this set of thinkers writing against equality, and that the problem is that people have blindly embraced equality as an ideal. Many of these neocons who are involved or writing these articles are taking aim at the civil rights movement and the Black freedom movement and the claims that are part of those political mobilizations.

The argument which observed that the distribution of wealth and resources is not just the result of some meritocratic ordering, but it deeply reflects racial prejudice, violence, disenfranchisement, political and economic power. And so it's not just as though it reflects people's innate worth.

And, and that... And so are taking, or criticizing the distribution of material resources as it is implicitly. And sometimes that's more at the forefront of those movements, sometimes it's less at the forefront, but I think it is, it is very much there, and that's part of what this group of thinkers picks up on to try to say, "No, actually, the real distribution of resources is, is, in the end it is and should be about this abstract idea of merit that we have to hold onto and insist upon again."

And those arguments take up part of the liberal claim, but then they twist it in a way that the liberals had maybe not intended at first, even though there was something in their arguments that allowed them to be used in that way. So Herrnstein, who comes to prominence writing about IQ and making a set of claims about the hereditary And implicitly racial nature of IQ and saying that eventually you will wind up with what he describes as a hereditary meritocracy, where the smartest people are mating with each other and then will produce the smartest children, and those children will have skills that are valued, and they're paid more.

And so eventually, that's gonna be a new aristocracy, and impervious because everybody knows that it's just better. When Herrnstein first puts this stuff forward in an, an article in The Atlantic in 1971, he really distances it from race explicitly, although it's always implicitly very much there, and p- his critics pick up on it right away.

When he writes about this again 25 years later with Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, race is very much present in that book, and I think it is an, a sign of how much more unequal the society had become between the early '70s and the early 1990s. Finally, the always the concluding question in the last minute or two, the way out of this.

You conclude with an evocation of the better side of American history, the abolitionists that undid slavery, for example, with the help of the Union Army. But it sometimes feel like the bad guys are firmly in control, so talk me out of my gloom. I don't know if I can altogether talk you out of your gloom, Doug, but I think that...

Well, first, I think there is, it's im- it, it can be invigorating to look at what these ideas are and try to understand them as a set of ideas and a pattern of thought. And that that actually gives us the tools to think about how to take them apart and how to not just have this be naturalized into how we see the world, but to see it as something to criticize rigorously and undo.

I also think that this book, I've been working on this for several years, but it has struck me as being published in the summer where we have the first trillionaire on the one hand, but also we are starting to see- He's not just a trillionaire, he's a real proponent to these social philosophies, too.

Right, and a full f- full-throated proponent of many of these ideas about inequality in all kinds of different ways, and a, a real skeptic about the capacity the, of, of democratic governance today and the, the, the idea of having a democracy at all. At the same time, we are also starting to see the beginnings of different kinds of political movements that are openly skeptical about this inequality, and that see concentrations of wealth to the extent that we have them now as really damaging our ability to have a functional democracy or really functional society at all.

I don't think it's an accident that Bernie Sanders is as popular as he is, even among people who claim that they're not on the left. I think that the victories of people aligned with Democratic socialism in New York and elsewhere are a sign of, revulsion about the kinds of ideas that this type of concentration of wealth permits to flourish.

I don't know if it's a, if it can really temper the sense of gloom, but I, I do think that the naming this vision of the world can be helpful in giving people a sense that actually their own values are really very different from what is being evoked here, and that those values can become the basis for, building a different society.

Now, Section C, BILLIONAIRES AND THE BACKLASH

The term crony capitalism was first coined by Time Magazine in 1981. Time's article described the Filipino government under Ferdinand Marcos as a case of crony capitalism.

Essentially, Marcos used the levers of the state to help his buddies dominate the business world. 

An associate's logging company was allowed to cut down hundreds of thousands of hectares of trees, which would've been illegal for everyone else. 

Marcos also appointed his former classmate and fraternity brother to the chief of the Philippine National Bank.

That friend used the bank to lend money to his own businesses. Through a mix of grants, cheap loans, licenses, and straight up dipping into government funds, Marcos helped him and his friends grow rich. 

The Time Magazine editor later reflected on why he used crony capitalism to describe the Philippines, and he said that this was not capitalism.

It was a weird distortion of the free market that benefited a few and kept the masses in poverty. 

And since then, the term has taken off. Crony capitalism is now shorthand for any economy where political pals are more important than business partners. Archie Hall is the US economics editor for The Economist magazine, and The Economist has put out a crony capitalism index every few years.

We're looking at billionaire wealth as a- within that looking at more cronyistic sectors and less cronyistic sectors and comparing how those, those different ranks look. 

Archie says sectors like mining and construction are particularly cronyistic when they're producing billionaires.

Often that means things like proximity to the state, so, do you have access to land, do you have access to licenses, resources, and are you able to limit competition, either directly or by lobbying the government to step in for you. 

In economics, this is known as rent-seeking.

There's a stream of rents, a steady flow of money to be made that's not earned because of innovation or entrepreneurship. It's basically just taking a bigger slice of a pie without growing that pie, or maybe even smashing bits of the remaining pie. 

Rude. 

And so two years ago, The Economist magazine tallied up all the big economies onto this table, and they looked at their billionaires, and they showed which countries' billionaires had the highest share of their wealth through cronyistic sectors like mining.

At that point, if you looked somewhere like Russia, which was right at the top of our ranking there, then the billionaires were mostly making their money in those classically cronyistic sectors. 

It's a simple measure, and it, it doesn't capture everything, of course, but by measuring how much of billionaire wealth was made in industries like casinos and ports and oil and gas, you can get a sense of whether the government is likely to be helping out its buddies.

Right near the bottom, Germany. 

Capitalism the way Adam Smith would've wanted. 

Yes, and actually, the US wasn't too cronyistic. It was 26th out of 43 countries. 

Yeah, just small bribes and kickbacks as a treat. 

So in the US, you look at the top billionaires, and you've got people who have largely built companies, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison.

So does this mean the US is not a crony capitalist economy? 

No, and I think all of those, those companies you listed, absolutely it would be very hard to say that the, the money they came to initially came from, close-knit relationships with, with the government. Jeff Bezos was- started getting rich in the '90s.

I think few people would say that him and Bill Clinton were re- really best of friends, it was that reason that Amazon did really well. that's a ludicrous thing to say. Now, whether that's gonna be true of the US forward-looking, and then also, of course, as people have already become billionaires, we now look at the relationships with, a lot of the tech companies, let's say, and the political system in America, yeah, you can, you can certainly see reasons for concern.

You can see the fact that a lot of the tech titans felt such an obligation to declare themselves to be simpatico, at least to a degree, with the ideological program of the president. you've seen things like, for instance, the intervention in Intel or, the- lengths Apple had to go to in order to avoid getting hit with some of the very heavy tariffs.

Again, those are all the sorts of things that, that would raise more concern that the business is feeling a need to get close to politics in order to say, stay ahead of their competitors. 

Yeah, there are scenes like this dinner party that Donald Trump recently hosted with a lot of tech leaders. 

Which included Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Apple's Tim Cook, and Bill Gates.

Mr. President, thank you so much, obviously for bringing us all together, and the policies, that you have put in place 

I want to thank you for setting the tone that's it. And so thank you for incredible leadership and 

They are kissing the ring. That's the blunt way to put it, and it's a scene that perhaps we're not used to in the US recently.

No, exactly. there's, there's always been lobbying in the US. There's always been some sense, businesses will, will have what they'll sometimes euphemistically call government affairs offices or things like that, that, that try to make sure that they're on the right side of regulation.

Sure. And if there are particular things they're keen on, that they, they push for those on Capitol Hill, and that, that's, that's been true forever in the US, is, is, is true in every democracy. The degree to which that's now both focused on personalistically staying on the right side of Donald Trump as a person, rather than engaging with a broader, a more amorphous political process, a- and also the sense in which that the stakes of doing so become so, so much higher.

the tariff regime can either be incredibly damaging or incredibly accommodating to, to your company. Which one of those two worlds we live in is, is mostly with the President. And in a context where we want companies to, to win and fail based on whether they do well in the marketplace, whether people like the things they produce, that's a, that's a pretty worrying place to be.

Now again, The Economist's analysis was done in 2023. Archie says that his guess would be that the US would still be far less cronyistic than countries like Russia or Malaysia, but he thinks the US might be rising up the ranks of crony capitalistic countries under President Trump. 

Take that TikTok deal we mentioned at the start of the show.

Our colleagues at NPR have reported on how the investor group does seem to be composed of people who have shown sustained loyalty to Trump, and that this looks like a reward. Overall, critics say it smells of rent-seeking. 

But beyond the TikTok deal and the spectacles of Trump hawking Teslas at the White House, Archie reckons there is a real risk with one particular way policy tends to be crafted under Trump.

The notion that you have executive orders issued that explicitly then get chipped away at and carved out in order to favor particular companies. So we've seen that with the tariffs. 

When a reporter asked how Trump would decide on tariff exemptions, this was his reply. 

You determine it from day to day?

just instinctively more than 

anything else. Instinctively. His gut. 

What's, what's really distinct about this presidency is the notion that in almost every bit of economic policy, if there's a deal to be made, the President is, is willing and happy and excited to make that deal. And so as a company, there's the notion of can we give Donald Trump something he wants, and can we extract a better deal for our particular company and carve out an exemption?

And, and that dynamic is, is quite novel to this presidency, is, is substantially worse, I'd argue, than, than what we've seen before, and is, is pretty worrying. 

Which brings us to the Democrats. It's long past time when they have to say, in one loud voice, no more. We are finally going to hold these criminals to account. Most recently, Trump committed a whole bunch of crimes, both during his first term as president and particularly when he lost the 2020 election and demanded that Georgia's Secretary of State find another 11,000 votes and sent a mob to the Capitol to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

Biden's Attorney General, Merrick Garland, waited 15 long, painful months before appointing Jack Smithand getting serious about holding this serial criminal to account. It was too little, too late. Every one of those decisions, from Ford through Clinton to Gore and Garland, was made by decent people who told themselves they were protecting our nation's institutions by letting a little Republican crime slide by.

Unfortunately, that's not the way this works. Instead, what they told the next Republican criminal, or in Trump's case, himself, was that they too should go ahead and crime because if they got caught, they'll get off with a slap on the hand or maybe at worst lose their office. Every one of these Republican presidents, in other words, showed the next that the price of crimes against our democracy was negligible.

That's how we got from Nixon hiding his bribes in the Oval Office to Reagan committing treason with the Iranians to the Bush brothers rigging Florida in two thousand to Trump selling meme coins from the White House and implicitly encouraging his agents to shoot citizens in the street. Other democracies have gone down this road and figured out how to recover from a political party becoming so corrupt it sanctions theft and even the open murder of its own citizens.

In Argentina, they put the ruling junta on trial in a civilian courtroom in nineteen eighty-five, just two years after the dictatorship ended and during a time when the generals still almost certainly could have retaken the government. South Korea impeached, removed from office, and sent- sentenced President Yun, Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison just fifteen months after he tried to declare a state of emergency and martial law to avoid the cons- consequences of his party's electoral losses, the same crimes Trump is openly contemplating now.

Brazil arrested and convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a January sixth-style coup and sentenced him to twenty-seven years in prison. They also convicted his generals alongside him. None of these countries collapsed. To the contrary, the democratic fabric of each was strengthened by holding their former political cri- criminals to account All are still democracies, and it looks like the same process will soon play out in Hungary.

Even South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which people think s-- of as a gentle alternative to criminal prosecution, wasn't designed to be gentle. People who failed to make full public confessions of their crimes were supposed to be imprisoned. The cautionary tale is that none were, which is a good part of why so many South Africans will tell you the wounds are still open.

The government broke trust even as it was trying to restore it. Increasingly, Americans get it, get this. There have to be consequences for betraying America, Ukraine, and democracy on behalf of Putin, looting our treasury and handing no-bid contracts to friends and business associates, traveling the world on our dime while picking up billions from dictators on the pretense of negotiating peace, killing unarmed civilians in the Caribbean and children in Iran, poisoning our air in exchange for campaign contributions, trying to overthrow our government and fix the twenty twenty-six election, sending armed, masked thugs into our streets to intimidate and kill us while organizing them into the country's largest domestic spying operation, handing trillions in tax breaks, all borrowed from the rest of us, to billionaire donors who are now trying to buy this twenty twenty-six election, and all the other crimes that you're welcome to list in the comments to this article.

If Democrats want to earn the votes of that eighty-nine percent of Americans who've lost faith in the government, they must, every one of them who wants our vote, publicly promise to prosecute these people. No more Garland pauses, not for Trump, Miller, Noem, Hegseth, the ICE agents, the crypto bagmen, the Abu Dhabi royals, or the pardon buyers who are cashing in on Trump's corruption every day.

On day one, the subpoenas must begin. Legislation mandating an independent counsel with a real budget and open trials in open court the way Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea did it. Impeachment of every corrupt billionaire and associated lickspittle from Trump on down, revealing the complicity of congressional Republicans.

You don't get to run on restoring trust and then govern like an abused spouse who keeps offering just one more chance. We've had four Republican presidents openly break the law or even commit treason just for political power. It must come to an end. So be sure you're ready to vote, and make sure your friends are too.

What Dr. King said was true nearly 60 years ago, and it is even truer today as our country, the United States of America, is now spending over a trillion dollars a year on the military while some 800,000 Americans are homeless, 85 million Americans are uninsured or under-insured, and millions of people cannot afford the basic necessities of life And this business of spending more and more on the military and turning backs on working families and the poor is not just happening tragically here in the United States.

It's happening all over the world, where we are seeing increased military budgets while the needs of people living in desperation are ignored. So not just in the United States, but all over the world, we are moving in the wrong direction, and our job is to turn that around

Instead of producing more bombs and weapons and seeing the military industrial complex enjoy huge profits, governments throughout the world need to come together to feed the children, take care of the vulnerable, and protect our planet from the ravages of climate change

And that is why we must continue and accelerate our efforts to end Trump's disastrous war in Iran, which is now spreading throughout the region

That is why we must continue to speak out against the extremist government in Israel and the genocide they have committed in Gaza, and why we in the United States must end all military aid to the Netanyahu government

And that is, and that is why we must rally and work with grassroots activists in Russia to put an end to Putin's disastrous war in Ukraine, which has led, not widely known, not widely reported, but has led to the deaths of some 500,000 Russian soldiers, as well as mass destruction and loss of life in Ukraine.

And that is why we must denounce the United Arab Emirates' continued financial and military support of the RSF as it wages a campaign of genocide and destruction in Sudan's civil war. While the billionaire class and the 1% have never, ever had it so good, over 60% of Americans in the richest country in the history of the world are living paycheck to paycheck.

Nearly 800,000 are homeless, and tens of millions struggle to pay for rent or mortgage or keep a roof over their heads. And let us be very clear, the rapid movement to oligarchy and the exponential rise in income and wealth inequality is not just an American phenomenon. It is taking place all over the world, and in my view, is the most important economic reality of our times.

In country after country, what we are seeing is working people sick and tired of seeing the very rich get richer while they struggle to put food on the table and pay for basic necessities. But it is not just income and wealth inequality and concentration of ownership that we are seeing today.

Literally today, billionaires are determined to own our political system as well In the United States, as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires and corporations are legally able to spend as much as they want on political campaigns through their super PACs. And that, my friends, is exactly what they are doing right at this moment.

In the last election, presidential election, Mr. Musk spent at least $290 million to elect Trump as president, and now he is spending some 200 million more to help Republicans keep control over the Congress. And it's not just Republican billionaires. There are Democratic billionaires who are also playing an important role.

As the UN Secretary General remind us, there's another issue that we must confront. In my view, artificial intelligence, AI, and robotics are the most transformational technologies in the history of humanity They have the potential to eliminate tens of millions of jobs. They threaten the privacy, AI threatens the privacy of virtually every person in this world through mass surveillance, surveillance.

Every phone call you make, every website you visit, every email that you send, somebody will know it. It is advancing exponentially. In under four years, we have gone from an AI that could barely write a coherent tweet to AI systems that have already escaped the control of the companies that built them.

Take a deep breath and ask yourself, where will AI be in two years, in four years, in 10 years? Will human beings be able to control this exploding technology? So let me make a very radical suggestion, and that is if the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of our country and the people of this world must make the decisions regarding AI, not just a handful of big tech oligarchs

And that is why I hope very much that when President Trump and President Xi meet, on Thursday, I hope very much that they will sit down and begin the process of negotiating a comprehensive treaty to establish a pause on advanced AI and a ban on AI super intelligence. 

Vermont's Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders speaking at Riverside Church in New York on Monday.

why don't we just start with some background? what exactly is the billionaire tax? How did you and, the others involved in developing it develop it, and why do you think we need it?

Great question. so the other developers are Brian Galli at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley, and David Gamage, who's at Missouri. And so we started working on versions of this tax during the pandemic, and the idea was that there was great emergency, in that case the pandemic, not being handled well by the federal government.

And certainly before we understood that there'd be this strange str- K-shaped recovery such that in fact state revenues would not be, severely hit. It looked like there'd be a, a major hit, to state and local revenues at the worst possible time. And the question was, what should we do? And so that emergency was paired with the fact, as y- as your introduction pointed out, this explosion of income, inequality.

So a relatively small tax could yield quite a large sum of money very quickly on an emergency basis. And so our first version of this tax was drafted, in twenty twenty. We then worked on updated versions of it. We, w- wrote very long and, probably tedious law review articles developing some of the ideas as to how...

The, the, the mechanics of these taxes. And we worked on, con- including a proposal, a legislative proposal for a wealth tax here in California that really went nowhere. the big thing that changed was the so-called, Big Beautiful Bill Act, ABBA, which was passed in July of twenty twenty-five, that combines large and spectacularly regressive and poorly designed tax cuts, which are generally unpaid for, except for cutting healthcare to the very poor through, the w- and the working poor through Med- Medicaid.

So this combination of, an urgent need created by poor federal policy with A even further explosion of wealth inequality such that the wealth of billionaires had doubled again since we had first articulated our, our initial proposal meant that a small tax, so 1% and change a year, temporary for five years, so about what people pay on their real property, that tax was, would yield enough money to fill the gigantic hole created by this, poor federal policy.

So in one sense, it's an emergency measure designed to kinda counteract the regressive tax policy of the Trump administration. So why a wealth tax? 'Cause y- what... Some people may think, "Well, why not just raise the income tax or raise the property tax or..." there are a lot of ways to raise we- revenue, and a wealth tax seems somewhat unusual.

Great question. So- I'll answer firstly by making a couple of analogies, and I apologize, it's just, I guess, a professional hazard. so imagine there's a f-spectacularly successful IPO. If there's a spectacularly successful IPO, imagine there's a lawyer involved, and that lawyer did good work. That lawyer earns $10 million, a California lawyer.

Most of that $10 million will be taxed at the highest personal income tax rate in California. Let's simplify it to 13%. If there's, a banker involved, same thing. If there's an engineer involved, maybe a little bit more complicated, probably also pay 13%. But the founder, who's now a billionaire, will pay nothing in income tax, and the reason for that is that they just have shares that are suddenly worth $1 billion or $10 billion.

And unless they sell them, there's no income to be taxed because income tax is a realization-based system, so it's based on actually selling stuff. But you might say, "Well, to be a billionaire and enjoy yourself, you have to sell stuff." You do not. You can borrow. And in fact, borrowing, again, under the income tax, doesn't have to be this way, but under the income tax as currently designed, borrowing is not itself a realization event.

So you can borrow all you want and never pay anything. And so it doesn't make-- So in terms of basic fairness and efficiency for similarly situated taxpayers not to pay the same amount and for the most affluent to pay the least. Something similar is true of property taxes. Most Californians pay about 1% and change in, if they have any wealth, on their wealth in the form of real property.

And the question is why, just because it's real property versus intangible property, the people who have the most property, shouldn't pay about the same 1%? And in fact, the general property tax, which was in place in most of the country in different ways, obviously between 1830 and the 1930s, did include intangible property as part of the property tax base.

And so the idea this is wholly new or different, is not true, as well as, again, the basic fairness and, and efficiency intuition of why go to the middle class or even merely affluent who are paying their 1% plus on their real property when the most affluent, who have a huge amount of intangible property, are paying little or nothing.

So in a way, you could see this then as closing a loophole, in effect. 

I-- Yes. Yes. I- 

Okay. Interesting. so the-- some people would say, "Well, California already taxes people at a very high rate, and, it's got a huge economy. Why do we need more money? Is this not a case where the state has just mismanaged its budget and now has to go back to the well, in a different form?"

It's worth taking a step back here, I think, and just considering the fact that- This country doesn't spend very much on its social safety net. And as up until, say, 2010, there's a great quote from Ronald Dworkin pointing out that a country this rich, to have that many-- this many people without health insurance is, is a disgrace.

And I agree with that. And we've made progress on that disgrace, since the, since the passage of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, both in terms of premium credits and, the Medicaid expansion. And California has been very aggressive and very successful at providing more basic coverage to more people.

And so this is a response to the federal government not spending money on these basic social safety net programs that it had been spending. It's not an example of California having made some terrible mistake or terrible mismanagement. Furthermore, Medicaid is a relatively efficient program in terms of providing basic social insurance to the poor.

Is there fraud? Sure. But keep in mind that what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, I keep having a hard time saying it, does is adds a work requirement. It doesn't add a, any fraud protection measures. Mm. And the work requirements are designed to throw people off the rolls. That's why it's, the CBO thought it would save a trillion dollars.

So it's nothing about, saving money. It's nothing about making government more efficient. It's just a mean-spirited way of spending less on the people who need it most. And in a way, the healthcare system's a system. So if rural emergency rooms have to close, in the Central Valley because of this measure, what will the emergency room look like at Stanford?

And so the idea that we're all in this together I, I would have thought was pretty clear, but apparently is not as clear as it might be. 

Okay. So in one sense then, this is a reaction to a crisis that's been generated by the decision to cut medical care and forcing that down to the state level, and states like California are trying to take up the slack, but, it's a big lift for, for a state this size.

That's right. It's a big lift even for a state this size, and if we did increase, say, the income tax, then going back to our initial IPO example, that means the lawyer and the bankers, the people already paying maybe not enough, we can have an argument about whether it's the right rate, but a reasonable rate, they'd be paying more.

Mm. 

And the person making the most, would still be paying virtually nothing. And that doesn't sound like the right answer, that we... That at the very least we should go to the people most able to pay first. 

All right. 

And if d- in correcting that loophole, we didn't have enough money to provide basic social safety net services, then we should have a further discussion.

But we're nowhere near having that discussion because we can't even have the, most affluent pay. And furthermore, because of the explosion of wealth inequality, there's very... I- it's just a coincidence that this 1% five-year tax Is enough to fill this hole, but it's, it's a coincidence generated by this explosion in wealth inequality.

So the problem we were trying to address, which is really what precipitated everything, is that on July 4th of last year, President Trump signed the one big bill.

It was the largest assault on the American healthcare system in our history. It removes $1 trillion of funding over the next 10 years, and it specifically does it by cutting healthcare services and healthcare coverage for millions of people. Everyone agrees in California that this legislation, this bill, is gonna result in three and a half million people losing healthcare coverage, 150,000 healthcare workers losing their jobs.

Millions and millions of consumers will be paying more in premiums, deductibles and co-pays, and we're already seeing the closure of healthcare facilities around California in anticipation of the full effect of the cuts, which happens on January 1 of next year. We did everything we could to try to stop Congress from adopting the legislation, and we failed.

And so on July 5th of last year, we started asking ourselves, "What could be done to prevent a collapse?" literally a collapse of the healthcare system here in California, and there's a similar thing happening all around the country. And a- as I think people know, California has a ballot, a mechanism at the statewide level.

It's routinely used by all sorts of groups, organizations, interested people. And the obvious thing to us, because there was simply no way to deal with the magnitude of this problem with ordinary tools. And in fact, Governor Newsom asked to speak to me right before Christmas last year. He said very explicitly, "We completely agree with the scale of the problem.

Three and a half million people, a $25 billion hole in the state budget, 150,000 people losing jobs and the closures." He literally said, "I don't have a solution." And I said to him, "Well, Governor, we have a solution. And California is home to more billionaires than any other state in America. It is the place with more wealth than any other state in America.

And so our solution is a One time, 5% tax on the assets of 250 of the richest people on the planet whose wealth has grown enormously in the last few years. And one thing I wanna say, David, and I think this is really important, in 2019, seven years ago, California billionaires, just California billionaires collectively had $700 billion worth of wealth.

Today, seven years later, they're worth over $2.2 trillion. They've experienced more than 300% growth in their wealth in seven years, and we're asking for a one-time, 5% tax, not permanent That will allow three and a half million people to maintain healthcare coverage, and tens of millions of people not to be paying extraordinary increases in premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.

We think this is totally sensible. We think that whether it's Google or Facebook or Oracle or Microsoft, all of these huge tech companies in Silicon Valley that have made their wealth because of what California is, the University of California system, Silicon Valley, the, the population here, this is a modest, common sense thing to do.

And so, we just went into scramble mode talking to people we know. We were fortunate enough to, speak with some world leading academics from the UC system, economics professors like Emmanuel Saez, who is, s- many people believe the leading expert in the world on income and wealth inequality.

Darien Shanske, who's at UC Davis and a brilliant tax professor and law professor. And it's not that complicated. What is controversial and nobody wants to talk about the problem, the problem is a consensus view. Everybody agrees. The only thing that's controversial here is should the billionaires have to pay a little bit of money to solve an enormous collective problem that goes to the heart of whether or not California is livable for 99.99% of the population.

And we think that's fair. We think it's reasonable. So we put together a team, policy, lawyers, academics. We drafted the measure, we polled it, and we filed it and went out and collected the signatures, and it will be on the ballot in November. 

Some of the question that's been raised about it is the idea of it being a one-time tax on billionaires rather than something more long-term and structural, I guess, like a changing of rates, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm curious w- what your thinking was behind it being one time, and what your response to the idea that if it's one time, it's like one pot of money that may get the state through one rough patch, but won't actually fix a long-term problem. 

So first of all, I think that's fair criticism, and we thought a lot about that, and here was our reason.

We knew as a result of the consultations and the discussions we did before we filed our initiative, we knew that the argument was going to be deployed against us that this will force billionaires to leave the state of California and would threaten the prosperity and the competitiveness of the state.

We completely disagree with that diagnosis. We think all of the evidence is clear that's not true. But this is a political campaign, and we wanted to take that issue off the table. And from our point of view, when we were confronted in July with a problem of unprecedented magnitude, and we had to come up with a solution in just a couple of months, we made the choice that we did not want people to be able to legitimately say billionaires are gonna be forced to leave.

the truth is nobody's forced to do anything, but there is no economic incentive for billionaires to leave, despite all of the attention it's gotten in the press. The tax applies to people who were legal residents of the state of California on January 1 of 2026 All of the billionaires who are making this, well, factually incorrect argument are saying that, but we wanted to be able to legitimately say, "We're not trying to send anybody anywhere else, but this problem is so large and so pressing, and a five-year solution is better than no solution."

And we were trying, frankly, to address what's become the leading argument of our opponents and say, everyone agrees on the problem. Our opponents don't have a solution for this, and so we tried to take that argument away. They are dishonestly using it. We understand that, but that was the choice we made, and we thought a five-year solution would be enough time and enough breathing space that we could figure out the long-term and structural solution.

And frankly, we also thought the five years would then be proof itself that California continued to do fabulous and continues to thrive, and all of this AI wealth that's being generated here and everything Silicon Valley does, we have every expectation that's going to continue, and this is a distracting argument from our opponents who don't wanna talk about the thing they actually agree with, which is that three and a half million people are losing healthcare coverage, and 30-plus million people who are commercially insured are gonna pay more for premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

Let's talk a little bit about some of the larger politics surrounding the billionaire tax.

obviously, it's gotten an enormous amount of press and an, an enormous amount of attention. do how close, you are to gathering the requisite number of signatures? Is this likely to be on the ballot? 

I, the truth is I don't. they keep me in the basement drafting. They don't tell me how they're doing, with signature gathering.

so I don't know the answer, although I will... This does touch on the qu- the fact that there's a question that it might get on the ballot goes to this really, another common theme about whether this is a temporary or permanent tax. People say in this world-weary, cynical way, "Oh, there's no such thing as a temporary tax."

there is. There is such a thing in Califor- Californians, didn't we, we up the sales tax increase that, that was part, in two thousand twelve. It was a four-year tax increase, and they didn't inc- they didn't re-up that. Californians don't approve all taxes, right? They rejected a millionaires tax a few years ago.

They re-rejected split roll in twenty twenty, which was a big surprise. That was with, with everybody. By, by, by everybody, all the unions, Governor Newsom, Mark Zuckerberg supported, still lost. So the idea that- These things are all permanent is, I think, dubious. And when it comes to the signature gathering, the billionaires have put five, what we're calling revenge-ments on the ballot or gotten them through the process.

These are ballot measures like the Budget Stability Act that sound like totally reasonable, but in-- you have some poison pill inside that would, affect, our measure of how it would and what the courts would say is another question, but they definitely, that's the goal. And they are paying signature gatherers a lot to get signatures more than, more than the unions are.

And so there's a real question whether the, the unions can-- will be, will be able to get the signatures it needs because of the power of the billionaires- Mm. to, to, to, to, to pay more per signature. And that just goes to this question of whether or not this is gonna be a, there's such a thing as a temporary tax.

If this measure gets on the ballot, if it passes, despite clearly g- going to be outspent many times over, that, unions or other groups will look at this adventure and think, "This is great. This is something we wanna do again," I, I think that's a questionable assumption. 

So, Darien, I suspect that if this, tax passes, there'll be some legal challenges, and some people have claimed that it's unconstitutional or it's a taking of property.

What do you think the legal challenges will look like, and how, vulnerable would this tax be to legal challenge? 

Great question. There's no doubt that there'll be a lot of legal challenges ranging from the somewhat plausible to the completely implausible. And I, and we try to channel them in the bill by having an expedited review of facial challenges, that will go to a superior court and then the California Supreme Court as quickly as possible.

Because we understand that there will be these meritless challenges, and we want them to be resolved as quickly as possible. There will o- obviously also be some as-applied challenges, which people will have to pay taxes first and then, go through the regular process, and those will take longer.

Now, there are a lot of different kinds of challenges. I had promised before to talk a little bit more about residency, so let's take it a second to talk about how it works and why the-- it's normal science. There's nothing novel. So California had an income tax since nineteen thirty-five, and the billionaire tax proposal builds on The rules basically set in 1935, that's been a little bit cha- changed since then, for establishing California residents that has analogies in other states.

And the basic idea is that you're presumed to c- still be domiciled in California unless you can be shown, unless you show that you are not in California and for more than a temporary reason. Now, for a lot of people, that's not gonna be hard. I move, I'm gonna sell my house. I have a job in another state.

I'm gonna move there. And so that'll be done. For a lo- But for people in this particular billionaire class who decided to move by reincorporating the LLCs on December 24th, it's going to be a lot harder. And in fact, there is a big and developed body of law about this. So for example, a California couple wanted to sell their business, expected to make $20 million.

They wanted to not pay California income tax, so they m- moved to Nevada. They got their Nevada driver's license. They got a Nevada apartment. They sold the company in July, and the question was, as of July, were they Nevada residents or California residents? And the courts, said they are still California residents because they haven't established that their sojourn outside of California was other than temporary, given all of their California connections and history.

And so our position is that these rules indicate how we think quite reasonably that deciding to, to loudly announce in a tweet, that one is moving and buying yet another mansion in a different state, is not enough, to establish residency in another state, and, and rightfully so. 

Okay. So when the, if the billionaires leave to avoid the tax, they'll have to actually leave.

They won't be able to use some trickery in order to make it look like they're leaving while nothing's in fact changed. and that was one of the objections to the, the tax that, of course they'll just find a way around it. They'll find some loopholes. another question that's come up is, is this a retroactive tax?

Because one of the ways to prevent flight, as I understood it, was that the tax would be effective as of the beginning of 2025. Is that correct? 

2026. Oh, 

sorry, 2026. So 

the measurement date is January 1st, 2026. And so- If the tax passes in November, then it is true January is before November. And so I-- But I would resist calling it retroactive, and here's why.

Because in a classic retroactive case, in, say, the lead Supreme Court case, called Carlton, from nineteen ninety-two, Congress changes the tax law as of a previous tax year. So if somebody filed their taxes, got a benefit, and the, and Congress said, we never meant to give them that benefit. We wanna take that back."

Mm. And the court said they could. They basically use a form of rational basis. And so if we did make it twenty twenty-five, I think we would be on strong grounds. As it is, the court made clear that going back to the beginning of the calendar year is totally usual. The federal government has done that many times.

State governments do it all the time. It makes sense. States don't legislate on January first, right? They'll often legislate back to the beginning of that year. Nobody's filed any taxes yet for twenty twenty-six. It's not really retroactive or changing anybody's tax treatment for twenty twenty-six. So Short answer is will that, that yes, there'll be, w- there'll almost certainly be challenges, but they're frivolous challenges to the extent that by going back to the calendar year and not reopening a previous tax year, which would be permissible a- as long as it survives rational basis, which I think we could easily do, but we're not even doing that.

We're just going back to the calendar year. 

So maybe let's talk a little bit about the national climate in which the billionaires tax is coming about. The, as I mentioned at the opening of the show, there's been a lot of talk about disparities of wealth, but there's been a lot of talk about the, increasingly very public role that certain billionaires have played in our national politics, and it's generated some blowback.

Do you have any sense of how the billionaire tax fits into this larger national political environment? Are billionaires worried, and would they be right to be worried that this will spread? That, California's a bellwether, and if we get a wealth tax here, we'll probably have one in whatever state they might wanna move to in the next few years.

Well, not being a political scientist or a soothsayer- ... I'm not sure, what, is going to happen. I will say that one of the surprising trends I, I've noticed is since the introduction of this bill has been many billionaires and their supporters saying things like, "Well, I agree we probably need to change the stepped-up basis rule so that people can't inherit assets without paying tax on the built-in gains," or, "I think it would be reasonable for billionaires to pay tax when they borrow against their assets because in a sense they really are realizing their income."

And so it feels like there is an understanding amidst the magnitude of the inequality as well as the magnitude of the fiscal imbalance that we had even before the current administration made it, so much worse, that there's going to need to be adjustments, and that- I think it's-- So I, I don't know what's gonna happen, and I don't wanna e-even pretend to know, but I do, but I do wanna observe that there does seem to be this dawning recognition, even among opponents of the tax, that they'll often raise other kinds of related reforms, as preferable.

We've talked about why the political establishment, certainly politicians, oftentimes side with billionaires, even on something like this. One thing that's been, I think, confusing to a lot of people, observers who are looking at this from the outside, they hear that the California Teachers Union is opposed to this.

They hear that Planned Parenthood is opposed to this. In preparing for this interview, I tried to look around at what the official arguments were against it, and, and frankly, it was some mishmash of, "This is not a one-time sol-" It was, very perfect is the enemy of the good argument. It's only a one-time tax, so it's not a long-term solution.

There's questions about if billionaires end up leaving, that'll reduce the tax base in the future for various other, other ideas. They're very speculative. I, I think my question is, what intel have you heard from groups like that, not politicians, but, another union or Planned Parenthood, about why they're actually opposing this?

What do you suspect is going on, and what do you say to whatever arguments they're making? 

I don't have to speculate. I'll tell you exactly what's happening. And the first thing I wanna say is the great majority of unionized teachers in California are for the billionaire tax. The great majority of Planned Parenthood employees and patients are for the billionaire tax The people that are, quote-unquote, "not for the billionaire tax" are a handful of state level leaders, and it's very clear what's going on.

They are being coerced by Governor Newsom. God knows what he's promising. God knows what the details are But there is no policy reason. This is all evasive rhetoric, and they know union members in California are even more favorable about the billionaire tax than the general public, and the general public is large majority in support of this.

And so I just think it's what people hate the most about politics. It's why the Democratic Party is losing middle class and working class people. It's why the decline to state group, which in California is now the biggest group. We need common sense solutions. And the idea that we're trying to paint billionaires as victims, it's just an absurdity.

And so that's what the governor is doing. And by the way, the governor has a lot of tools at his disposal and can make a lot of accommodations to people who are looking for all kinds of things, but this is so much bigger than any of that. And I'll be honest with you, I think it's shameful that, given what we're facing, and it's more shameful on people who consider themselves to be so-called progressives.

better. I don't know how you get to that conclusion when you see what's going on in this state and where everybody again agrees millions and millions of people are gonna suffer unnecessarily, hospitals and emergency rooms and clinics are closing, and because two hundred and fifty people expect us to all do exactly what they want.

This is an important debate and an important thing. And, and we fully expect it's, there are gonna be all kinds of lying and misinformation and all the rest of it, but I think people's instincts are right on this, and that's what we see over and over again. 

I just wonder, do you think that the part of this...

If there is a leadership gap between leaders of organizations now joining Governor Newsom in opposing this and the membership of organizations in supporting this thing, if that does exist, how much of-- Let's go back to the point that you made about billionaires and how much billionaires i-implicitly offer to people who side with them, right?

I'm getting to the real human element of politics here, which is that if a presidential candidate knows they're siding with billionaires, they can very well expect that the billionaires are going to help fund their presidential campaign. But there's also this one level beneath in the political class, which is, listen, if I'm a leader of an organization or further down the political ladder and I'm siding with billionaires in my position as a group leader, there may be benefits for me down the road, two, three, four years where I'm not the leader of the organization anymore, but I'm getting rewarded in some other way.

That second level of politics that people don't see, where there are the insinuations of rewards down the road if you side with people with power. Do you think that's going on here when it comes to the political class, whether it's consultants, leadership of groups, et cetera, et cetera? 

Absolutely.

There's no question about that. That is absolutely going on. And again, it's going on in a place where, the rhetoric California's brand, if you will, in terms of politics, is this is a very blue state and, we're so woke this and woke that. When it gets down to money, it is exactly the same.

There's no difference between... That these folks know exactly what they want, and all of that is either implicit or explicit, and it's on offer. And the one thing that I think has been very underreported, it is beyond debate that there is an enormous gap between the leadership of the folks who've come out against this and their constituencies, whether they're members, patients, what have you.

That is absolutely beyond dispute, and it should be talked about more, that the general public, their views on this is very different than the governor, other state officials, other officials. There's absolutely no question about that. By the way, I wanted to mention, San Diego is the second-largest city in California, the second-largest county.

The Labor Council in San Diego voted unanimously to support the billionaire tax, and there were representatives of unions in the vote today who voted differently than some of the statewide leadership. The couple of organizations in the union world that have come out against this was not shared at the county level in San Diego.

We think there's a lot of that out there. We know there's a lot of that out there. Too much of this, what's gone on so far strikes us as being like an episode of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. these guys who have $500 million yachts and 15 mansions all over the world, and we... we're all just captive to their whims.

And, we gotta start... Again, there's gotta be more honest discussion that this is... First of all, there is a problem, the healthcare collapse that's being underreported, and the views of regular people. And there's this debate, and I know what's going on right now, too, about, why did the Democrats, in the autopsy report or whatever it was that came out a few weeks ago.

This is exactly why. This is exactly why. And frankly, obviously Governor Newsom's running for president. There's no debate about that. Everybody understands that. There hasn't been an official announcement yet. But if you wanna be the representative of the billionaire class after everything that's happened recently in American politics, my advice to him is this is not where the people are at.

This is where the donors are at. This is where the billionaires are at. But take a look around. That's how powerful these folks are, that even incredibly skilled and effective folks are susceptible to their powers. 

And Finally, Section D, FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

when you first started covering Occupy, what did you think you were looking at? It 

was definitely the start of something interesting and exciting, and I think that's why it snowballed so quickly.

We first heard about some folks are camping out in Zuccotti Park. I don't know if we necessarily sent anyone the first day or the second day, but definitely by the third day it was growing. There were people everywhere, and it was clear this is something that's not gonna stop after a couple days, and it's worth getting there on the ground, talking to people, and finding out what do they want.

And remember the context as well. This is just after the Arab Spring. Hmm. Protesters occupied Tahrir Square in Egypt, so there was a sense that maybe some of that youth energy of protest and defiance was gonna come here to New York City. Bloomberg was the mayor at that time, and the bank bailout had just happened.

There was a lot of anger about that as well. So we were, as reporters, curious to see where is this gonna go, so being there to check it out was really something to see. 

Yeah. You're talking about how new this movement was, and all of the young activists that were a part of it. And, after a few weeks in, the coalition started getting broader, right?

By early October, organized labor was showing up: transit workers, building service workers, city workers, some of the biggest unions in New York City. Jack Flokaitis was one of them. He's a retired subway repairman from Brooklyn Transport Workers Union Local 100. Here's what he had to say. 

When I come here, I feel energized.

I, I don't know what it is. I just feel, ... I don't- I can't explain it. I just feel good here. People are thanking me for my service for the subway, for working in the subway. Can you imagine that? That nobody ever thanked me, for anything, And people saying, "Thank you for your service," that's incredible.

So Stephen, what did it mean for the movement when labor came in? 

Well, it obviously didn't take long for more and more social justice groups, or even just straight up classic labor groups to glom onto this growing movement. So I think it definitely legitimized what was happening. I think it gave the protesters who were there from the beginning a little wind in their sails, like a little nod that, "Hey, you're on the right track.

You're onto something here." But I think, for reporters and people trying to like make sense of the story, I think it maybe got a little diluted, although I wouldn't say it was like crystallized from the beginning, but they basically coined the phrase the 99%. but there was never like a specific goal in mind.

It's not like, suffragette movement, where it's like getting women the vote was the goal. So I think it left it open for different groups to join this, m- growing ball of energy that is social justice, something related to the people, whether it's labor workers, or whether it's prison reform, or whether it's banking reform.

So as a reporter, it's kinda hard to make sense of all this. It's just what you see, what you feel is momentum and energy. 

Mm-hmm. You're talking about how difficult it was to cover as a reporter with so many pressing issues happening and being talked about across the park. What were your stories like back then, like without being able to truly focus on one thing?

So at first it was like, well, why are they there, is what reporters are asking. Find out what people are saying. And it's like you could ask 100 people and you would get 100 different answers. I suppose if anything, it became for a lot of editors, a story about public space. Mm. They were not supposed to be there all night.

And it became, very quickly a clash between protesters and the police, and a a face off between who's gonna win this battle over public space, and who has the right for their voice to be heard in public. 

Yeah. And Occupy went on for nearly 60 days. and then in November, the city cleared protesters out of Zuccotti Park.

Until then, if you wanted to know where Occupy was, there was one place you could go. Stephen, what happened to the story that you were working on once the park was gone? 

It did get a little trickier, and I think the momentum for it got diffused. Although you have to remember, by that time, this was a global story at that point, so there were Occupy encampments all across the country in cities everywhere.

Even President Obama was talking about it. 

People are, are frustrated and, the, the, the, the protesters, are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works. 

So they had made their mark in a way. Like, they had succeeded to change the conversation

Stephen, you were a younger reporter covering Occupy Wall Street back in 2011, and of course, you're so much wiser now, and you've- I wish ... grown in your career. But I'm wondering, like, what advice would you give your young self? 

I would certainly tell myself to slow down, take a breath. Even though it felt very chaotic in the moment, and there was just a lot of stuff going on, it was a circus-like atmosphere.

On the one side, people are just being joyful and having fun together, but then there were also people doing serious community-building work. And even though everybody had a different reason for being there, it eventually coalesced into these various social justice movement building skill seminars for people.

And I would later see that manifest when New York City was flooded by Superstorm Sandy, and parts of Lower Manhattan and the Rockaways and Coney Island were totally ravaged by the storm, and s- the city just couldn't provide resources fast enough or quick enough to help people. These groups seemingly spontaneously formed, but the truth is the foundation was really built during Occupy.

So they had these groups pop up. They were l- actually called, like, Occupy Sandy. But they were relief groups essentially. They were, mobilizing to help provide people things they needed. So they provided food for people, places to recharge their cell phones. They even helped cleaning out and rebuilding people's homes eventually.

Mm-hmm. and so, a lot of the skill building that was happening there for people who had never done that thing before, I think, was really foundational. And really the best example is several years later when the Black Lives Matter movement launched. Mm. I saw total echoes of Occupy Wall Street there with just the way protests were organized, the leaderless nature of the movement, and how it was able to build organically.

And just like Occupy, obviously Black Lives Matter cropped up all over the country, and quickly. Mm-hmm. 

You guys obviously have a great article out in the New Catalyst called Occupy in Retrospect. We're obviously gonna link that down below. So last year was the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and I wanna make clear, your article isn't really about Occupy, right?

It's more of a response to all of these glowing retrospectives that came out last year. and you guys have, you guys are arguing that these retrospectives, for the most part, advance an incorrect origin story, particularly, around the relationship between Occupy and the two Bernie Sanders campaigns that came after it.

So just to dive in, Ben, maybe if you wanna start with, like, what is the commonly understood Occupy origin story that you guys are arguing against? And then maybe Christy, if you can pick up where it goes wrong and, how this origin myth took root. 

Sure. I think anyone who reads left publications, saw the flurry of Occupy retrospectives, around, like, October 2021, which was the 10-year anniversary.

And, most of those articles, recognize certain shortcomings in the movement, and they reject, what they see now as an immature, demandless horizontalism that was, that was a real hindrance, to the s- to the growth and success of Occupy. but they nonetheless see it as the origin, a really important, political origin for a lot of things that came after, Black Lives Matter, the, the Bernie Sanders campaigns, and the rejuvenation of the Democratic Socialist of America.

And in all those ways, it sees Occupy as the rebirth of left politics and the origin of all of these things that came afterwards. so that's the, the myth, and I think it's fairly common, again, in most left publications, and I'll let Christy explain why we think it's a myth.

Right. So I think the point for us is that while Occupy preceded these other developments, like BLM, Bernie, or DSA, it didn't cause them. the cause is, I think, much more a combination of ongoing political conditions, particularly the financial crash of 2008. Mm-hmm. and then, but also, like, 30 years of unrelenting, unrelenting, neoliberalism before then.

and Occupy as, was, as we say in the article, the last instance of the same old, same old response of the left to these 30 years of neoliberal rule, which were mostly ineffectual, and involved no programmatic response, that's being pursued in an organized, strategic way. so I think we see it as important to see that, Occupy was not the beginning, but really the end for a few reasons, which is part of, I think, Jen's question as to why the myth, our answer, I think, is first that, there were real tensions, that persist...

There are real tensions that persist in the left today, that can be traced back to how people came to be involved in left politics, and the, the myth functions to authorize people who came from that Occupy background. it authorizes them to assume positions of authority within left spaces today, that they haven't maybe in fact earned, because they haven't been doing, the type of strategic, more strategic universalist demand-based politics, that have, cropped up since the Bernie Sanders campaign, any longer than anyone else, that's new to the left in this period has, were all figuring this out together, and yet you have these voices, speaking with authority because they were there from the beginning, from Occupy.

and I think we also wanna point out that there are material incentives, that exist for those who came out of Occupy to perpetuate this Occupy origin story myth, that many of them made careers in the, in left media out of this experience. so it's, it's a legitimation narrative that continues to allow certain people to take up disproportionate amount of space in and among left discussions today.

So it seems like one central, central point of that tension is specifically the myth that Occupy led to Bernie Sanders, that you can draw a direct line from the people who were at Occupy, the movement itself, to the Bernie Sanders the, the two Bernie Sanders campaigns. You guys actually argue that it- the, the relationship goes the other way.

Ben, can you explain how that works? Because I, I think that if you were to just take a cursory look at, like, the language of Occupy Wall Street, the 1% versus the 99%, and also a lot of prominent Occupy Wall Street people actually went on to literally become part of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

but why did Occupy not actually generate the two Bernie Sanders campaigns? 

Right. So in, in the article we distinguish between these two things. On the one hand, the rhetoric and the ideology behind the two, and on the other hand, the people. And as you say- Mm-hmm ... there's a lot of, like, commonality there.

But just starting with the rhetoric, it's true, that Bernie Sanders... there are those, well-known YouTube videos online of Bernie going back 30 years, and he says the same things over and over. but he does, and his campaigns did adopt the 1% versus the 99% language, which did come out of Occupy.

And, in both camps there's this, well, there's a anti-capitalism. Mm-hmm. but I think that as far as the rhetoric goes, that's where the commonalities end. Just on the face of it, right, if you look at, like, what Occupy was about, and we quote, an article from John Hammond where he just- where he identifies five key traits of Occupy activism.

And he says that there are five things that characterize Occupy. It's, horizontalism, so no formal leadership; prefiguration, like attempting to model the future desired society- autonomy from the state, mutual aid, and defiance of government authority. And all five of those things, if you think about, like, what the Bernie Sanders campaigns were about, it's just, there's a clear disconnect there, right?

there was vying for state power, it was organized around a clear leader, there were concrete demands- Yeah ... Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, et cetera. And in all those ways, they're just clearly different, right? And I think this is maybe where the limits of the word anti-capitalism come in, and why we ought to defend, Democratic socialism as something concrete and different from just anti-capitalism in a very vague sense.

And if you just say anti-capitalist, sure, like, Occupy and Bernie both fit within that, within that phrase. but there's a clear difference between Occupy anarchism and, and Democratic socialism. So that's the... That's, like, just on the face of it, I think that the Occupy origin story has to make sense of that, of that break.

and we wanna argue that there's a clear, clear difference there. and then, now the second aspect, the people. So, there were a lot of people who were involved with Occupy who eventually became involved with the Bernie Sanders campaigns. but in the article, we look back at around 2014, 2015 to see what, what was going on around then.

And I think in the Occupy origin story, there's this idea that the insufficiency of Occupy itself led people on their own accord to mature in their political orientation, and that's what led them to the Bernie Sanders campaigns. And what we argue is that if you look at the time, like, before Bernie's first, primary run There wasn't really much progression in, in the so-called movement, right?

there was a lot of stagnation. They kept going back to Zuccotti. A lot of the news stories focused on high-profile arrests. Micah White, who's now called out as a Occupy grifter, was, was one of the most prominent faces of the movement, right? And then Bernie comes along, and all that changes.

And our basic argument is just that, the Bernie primaries were the best things happening in the activist world, so of course a lot of people were absorbed into those campaigns. But they were absorbed by the, by the new emphasis, by the majoritarian orientation, and they, they, they shifted in their political orientation from liberal anarchists into liberal socialists, and that was great.

I think that, all of us matured in our political orientation through the Bernie campaigns. But to say that they shifted beforehand and led the charge, I think is just an inaccurate rendering of the story. 

A lot of people remember Occupy as chaotic and leaderless, and I'm wondering from your perspective from the inside, did that feel like a problem, or did that feel like it helped the movement? 

I think there are pros and cons to it. I think in some ways it allowed many people to step into a movement for the first time without any formal training or experience and plug in and not feel that they were bogged down by a structure.

And in other ways, it created a vacuum where many of the existing inequities that are present in our world, the occupation can conform to that in ways so like people who are highly educated, who come from privileged backgrounds, who could come in and just harness a social power, a social capital that moved things faster and in your direction.

If you weren't comfortable in that space, maybe you didn't feel so empowered in that space because there was no structure. Certainly there were a lot of flaws with the encampment, lack of demands, a lack of a clear leadership and organizational structure. I think for some people that represents chaos.

For other people, that represents a lot of opportunity, a way to break out of molds and to create many leaders, whereas traditional organizations have clear hierarchy that sometimes stifles creativity, stifles thought, stifles, the ability to think outside of what is a party line or group think, or what is the stated mission, for example.

One of the organizers that you were on the front lines with, Micah Bournefree, was recently on WNYC, and he said that going into Occupy, activists had a vision of what it would take to make radical change in America. But in doing so, Micah said that he learned it wasn't enough. 

We thought it would take a broad-based social movement with, millions of people in the streets, largely non-violent, which is what we had with Occupy.

And I think when we achieved that with Occupy, it revealed something about the story that activists have been chasing for many years, and it revealed that, that's not enough. There's a, an error in that particular way of doing activism, and that's what I, I meant. 

What are your thoughts on that?

I think what we got out of Occupy was a narrative that has persisted today, the 99% versus the 1%. It's the underclass versus the ruling class. I think that is the success of the encampment that resonated across the country and activated a lot of people. And yes, there were a lot of people mobilized, and I think what we've realized and what the fight continues to be is the way that that ruling class has captured our political system.

So that's why you had a successful primary campaign like Bernie Sanders. That's why we were able to have an AOC. And in some ways I will say Perhaps it is not enough. I don't know what will be the threshold, but I know that we continue to mobilize, we continue to name the problem here, we continue to name the corporate criminals that are poisoning our water, creating food recalls, that are making our housing unaffordable.

So we have to keep moving in that direction until it's done. There's nothing to do but to continue to fight to win. Mm-hmm. 

As someone who was there, what role do you think Occupy actually played in creating the politics that we see in New York City today? I'm thinking specifically of the DSA here.

I think there's a clear lineage from Occupy to where we are now. I very clearly see that Bernie was able to capture some of that energy of the Occupy Wall Street movement because of the narrative of the 99% versus the 1%. I see, Trump winning the election the first time, accelerating, DSA, accelerating those economic populist positions across the country.

I just think it's all tied together, but it's certainly, not without the history of all of the movements that brought even us to Occupy. 

You were in your late 20s during Occupy Wall Street. Now you sit on the New York City Council. How did Occupy Wall Street help activate your activism? 

Yeah. For me, the encampment, that movement allowed me to find community with people who were also just disillusioned by our governing institutions, who also felt that we were not in a place to address- existential threats like the climate crisis or provide real healthcare for people or house people or address mental health, all the things, all the things that we are struggling with and continue to fight for.

I was able to find community with people there who have committed their lives. Like, they are in a lifelong commitment to the broader movement for social change, for positive social change. 

Are you surprised by where you are today? 

I'm extremely sur- I'm a very left-wing person. I considered myself at the time of a s- social anarchist persuasion.

I was very anti-state. I felt like the state was unable to take care of people, and I was very vocal about it. I'm also, very pro-decarceration and, lean towards an abolitionist mindset, so I- I was never imagining myself as someone in politics. being a public servant, absolutely. I always wanted to be of service.

I never wanted to work for the private sector, but not in this role, and I didn't ever think that this community would accept me, but they were my community's on board with these issues. I represent a mostly working class Latino and Black community, and, we have a Bangladeshi community. When you sit and talk with people, like, they're like, "Yes, ma'am, I understand," and, "What are we gonna do about it?"

Mm-hmm. So people understand the issues. there's a lot of education that exists around folks. They just, they feel it in their daily lives. I was very surprised and did not at all imagine this for myself. I was a carpenter, like, after Occupy , so I was not- What? Can we 

talk more about that? 

The carpentry.

I was a bike delivery worker. Like, I ha- I ran an, a youth organization. I opened a community hub with friends from Occupy called Mayday Space, and this was not on my bingo card ever for my life. I've never, ever said out loud I'd ever wanna be a, a politician in any way. and but it's the perfect role 'cause it's term limited.

... and that's number one, right? Yeah. And then the other thing is that at the city level, you really are, like, the closest to the people you can be in terms of helping solve issues and, and, help people take care of their day-to-day needs. It's, it's really the best place to be. It's less politiciany like out of all of the levels of being a politician you could be.

Let's talk about the legacy of, of Occupy Wall Street because- Yeah ... I, it, my, my assessment of it has changed over the years because I think in the, in the, direct wake of it, I was, very excited. And then like, a couple years out, I was like, "I'm not sure if that, it really amounted to anything."

And then three, four, five, six, seven years, out, I started to realize like All these people who are... I talk about who are activists, who are, providing mutual aid in the wake of Sandy, or they're, preventing, people from getting kicked out of their homes in Minnesota, or- Yeah ... they, they all came out of Occupy.

Absolutely. Yeah. 

and, and, and I would say even in the context of like, when Bernie, had his run in 2016, and he's talking about- Mm-hmm ... the 99%. that- Mm-hmm ... came out of Occupy when, Yeah. Yeah ... g- say more. 

Yeah, no, I think you're, you're, you're, you're really right. I started off with saying, some of the dark parts of the legacy of it are struggles around power and powerlessness.

But I really think that there, there's, like, an overwhelming contribution that Occupy Wall Street made, that it was really a, a, a, a rupture that, that w- b- brought thousands and thousands of people into, into political action, trained thousands of leaders, some of whom you're describing, that went on to build organizations that have become really the infrastructure of the movement on the left.

and, and, this is a thing that movements often do when they're successful is they, they, they introduce new language to the public. They change people's perspective about what's possible. They, they expand their imaginations. And so this, this thing, the 99%, like, it's... I- it's hard to overstate how important of a contribution that is to the story of this country.

Like, that just was not... That's not what we were talking about- No ... before then. And, and the 99% versus the 1% is, like, when you really... When you think about it, it is an introduction of, like, class struggle into the public mainstream conversation. And here's the... Bernie's a fantastic example because he's the most disciplined, consistent politician on, on Earth.

Like, he's, he's not from this planet, And, and, and, and so we could say with very, with great confidence that he's been saying basically the same thing for decades. But suddenly in 2016, it beca- it was popular. 

Yep. 

And that's because, because a movement came around and changed people's common sense about class.

And, and so, and so Bernie, and then the Squad, and AOC, and, and the growth of, of DSA, and, and, and Zoran, like, these are part of a trajectory that all have their own, they all have their own inputs, and, and, and leaders, and, and ways that people develop, and it's not all through Occupy, although I think that a lot of leadership came out of that, too.

But, but I think this, this, this changing, the expansion of the imagination is a huge contribution, and particularly towards this On this trajectory that we're on now where there is like a, a, a, a left, a democratic socialist left or, or whatever that's on the rise, I think like is very much part of the lineage of that.

Yeah. 

Do, do you think, and, and, and, and honestly, like I, I was reading about this, $130 million, essentially a settlement that, DoorDash is paying. Mm-hmm. And, 

Mamdani's got a, I can't remember what the name of it is. It's, the functional equivalent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but also I think workers, in it. Mm-hmm. Sam Levine I think is the, the guy who's heading it. 

Mm. 

And they're building in the Mamdani administration, they're building essentially a huge leftist, not just think tank, but like policy shop- Mm-hmm

that also is implementing these things. And- Mm-hmm ... I, I feel like none of this would be happening without Occupy. I- I- I... like those seeds that were planted there- Mm-hmm ... you never know where they're gonna go, and the seed can- Totally ... come off of what gets planted there and blow down the road a little bit- Totally

or a bird eats it and poops it out somewhere else. Totally. But, but honestly, I feel like that all of that stuff had to happen to be where we are today, and in five or six years from now, we could be talking about a- an administration, regardless of who becomes president, staffed by- Mm-hmm ... many of the people coming out of this Mamdani administration.

That is totally possible. And I, and I think I, I... What I think this is a good example of is the interplay between different types of movement organization and movement moments. Like I think, I think, the way that movement moments like that, these big ruptures in the streets, how we're talking, they're, what the, the, what we're saying is that part of what they're good for is, is this big picture transformation that makes a lot else possible.

And then, like talent, if, if we're lucky and if we do our work, then talented politicians and disciplined organizations and, it can take that and turn it into something real and durable and long-term that can then like keep it going. So, the stuff like the Mamdani administration is advancing that trajectory, and so it, it's a really important interplay.

I actually think that's one of the important lessons that I think we need to be grappling with in this moment. I don't know if that's okay to go- Please ... there. I think like I, I, I think we need to have respect for the different types of, the different ways that movements are and the different types of organizations that make movements up.

And I, I think, Occupy is an important example of w- we got a lot of things wrong, but we got something right, which is that elections are not gonna win us, like the society we deserve on their own. That's not gonna happen, and we have lots of historical evidence to show that that is the case.

And, what, what those kinds of movement moments are good for is, creating an opportunity for those kinds of more tangible wins, but then they also are necessary to keep driving the agenda forward and, and to also hold, politicians accountable and to create more opportunity. And I, I just, I, I worry sometimes that we think Like, we get successful at something, and we think that that's gonna be the thing, that if we just repeat, rinse and repeat, then it'll be enough.

And, I think, I think the, the truth is w- I think we're doing so- DSA, like the, the, the portions of DSA that are leading this, the, the, the left populist politicians who are, who are, like, providing this example and, and, and winning these things, the, the big statewide organizations and, all that stuff that makes this possible, I think they're a huge contribution.

I think they're a big intervention in this, like, politics of powerlessness. They're saying, "No, we want power, and here's how we're gonna get it, and here's how we're gonna wield it and deliver for people." And I, I think it's, like, an, an, a, a huge advancement. We, we didn't understand that stuff- Yep ... in, in the time that I was coming up.

But, we're, we did understand that, like, you can win a presidency in, in Chile, like with Allende, and like, and then they come with tanks, And it's like the, the, the billionaires who run this, who run this society, this empire, it will not go down without a fight. 

 

And, and so, 

we're-

this is exactly what I've been thinking about. Like, a- aside from the typical your favorite politician's gonna break your heart sometimes- Sure ... if, if Mamdani was made president t- tomorrow, and, Good for him. Good for him ... A- AOC the, the, the majority leader in the Senate- Mm-hmm

and, Summer Lee, the Speaker of the House- 

Mm-hmm ... 

we still, we would still, Got it ... be, have the fight of our life on our hands because- 

Yeah ... 

we now have trillionaires out there- 

Mm-hmm. 

Yeah ... who, who can do just- Yeah, they live in 

bunkers, 

and they have drones ... they live in bunkers. Like, people- And, and, 

have to understand that none of that's gonna work. The best case- Yeah ... scenario, the fantasy, case scenario is not gonna work without people being organized and ready to fight- Yeah ... on a daily basis. Like, this is not gonna go away. Yeah. There is no finish line- Yeah ... in this situation. There's really just- Yeah, 

I-

an improvement in our lives, but a, but a constant having to engage in this process 

Yeah, I think that's really right, and I think... And, so I think this, like, this, this thing that, that portions of the left are now doing really well of, like, winning elections for th- on behalf of the movement is a huge contribution, and we have so many other skills we need to keep, learning and adapting and getting better at.

We need to, we need to keep learning how to be in the streets. We need to keep organizing people to be in the places where they belong, like to be organizing day to day in your workplace, in your school, in your neighborhood, the places where people live and are gonna be long-term. That's where people-- That's where we need to build organizations and groups.

We need to learn how to build groups in a healthy way, like to... Because inevitably, once you start building groups, like, all this stuff comes up about leadership and power and identity and all these th- these, like, very real struggles that people engage in when they're together, But together is the only answer.

so let's talk about professional activism because I think right now in the absence of a critical mass of, actual real institutions on the left, the left is obviously largely volunteer-based, right? So, actually, you both are Medicare For All organizers, in addition to having day jobs and families, and it's obviously, obviously it's questionable how sustainable this can be long-term.

Now, obviously the flip side is that, when you start to professionalize left organizing, that also opens the door to, what we might call activismists, like people who are activists just for the sake of it, and also careerists. it's, it's, it's, it's a difficult thing and it, it'll, it, it depends a lot on, it's, it's very ambiguous I think, right?

So this is a long-winded way of asking, like, can you guys talk a little bit about both the bad and the good of professional activism, and how you think we can navigate this tension? 

So this is, answering this is providing an answer to your last question as well- Yeah ... about, like, the like, rejuvenation of Occupy as something that maybe matters more today than it did at the time.

and I think, to your, to your previous question, Bernie did give some, Did lend some importance to Occupy, like retroactively, right? Occupy became something more important because of the rejuvenation of democratic socialism. I don't think it was necessarily the Bernie campaigns that, that were completely responsible for that, though.

Mm-hmm. And this gets to your question, which is that, the remarkable thing about Occupy Wall Street, and Christie referred to this earlier, is that so many of the prominent people involved in it professionalized their activism. 

Right. 

Right? A lot of those people, got, jobs at left publications. They got jobs in the like left, nonprofit world.

They started their own nonprofits. They started their own org- own organizations. and, if you just go down the list of the prominent people, and, Todd Gitlin has a book about Occupy. Mm-hmm. Michael Levitt recently published a book about Occupy. all the people mentioned in there are either, fairly prominent left media figures or, ha- are, are, in lead positions at different nonprofits or political organizations.

and it's a remarkable feat, really. it's a Yeah ... accomplishment of Occupiers to have professionalized their, their activism. the difficult thing, as we point out in the article, is that that professional orientation did grate against Bernie's universalism and social democratic demands at the time.

and it's what's responsible for like keeping Occupy in memory and for, like, why there were so many glowing retrospectives, in the 10th-year anniversary. But again, it was problematic, I think, at the time. Anyone who, who lived through the two Bernie campaigns knows that there was a lot of contention on the left, and yes, that there were some social media squabbles and just general political immaturity, but there were some clear ideological divides too, and I think that just covering over that, doesn't help make sense of what actually happened during that time.

In terms of your other question about just, like, pr- professionals, I think that as you alluded to, like, any, any movement, if it's gonna sustain itself, needs to professionalize. It needs- Mm-hmm ... or it needs to at least have people who are doing things full time for money, right? Right. and there are better and worse ways of doing that.

There are, a lot of like, worker-centered organizations that end up just being glorified nonprofits in their advocacy for, for, the most vulnerable workers in our society. and then there are organizations, that look very similar, but actually do form themselves into actual worker organizations.

Like, I'm, just because I'm doing some research about this right now, if you look at the difference between something like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is... It doesn't really have much of a dues-paying membership, but they're trying to work in that direction, and it's mainly just a advocacy organization for domestic workers.

Mm-hmm. If you compare that to something like the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, that's, mainly funded by dues at this point, and it's led by some, some professionalized leaders, like Bhairavi Desai, but, they, they keep the interests of workers in mind, and they try to act as much like a union as possible.

So there's better and worse ways of professionalizing one's activism, obviously. 

so I don't want to pretend to have a strong answer to this question. It's genuinely difficult, I think as, as Jen said. 

Mm-hmm ... 

I think we don't have, in recent memory, real models for how you run an all-volunteer, dues-based operation.

you have union organizers who, who have this experience to some extent, but, 

Mm-hmm ... 

that's really where we need to get, and what the Sanders campaign I think laid the foundation for. we need some operation that provides an opportunity for people to plug in for the maybe two hours a week that they have- Right

potentially to give after work, and family and other obligations. and I just don't see that as something that professional organizers are necessarily incentivized to create, Mm-hmm ... in part because the nonprofit model has carried on just fine for years, mobilizing just a small handful of represented, representative marginalized population, whatever, whoever they're fighting for.

they can- Right ... they can get, the handful of faces they need, and people- 

Mm-hmm ... 

for interviews, or lobby days, or what have you. and they can be just fine, m- mobilizing that small number. They don't rely on- Right ... massive marches, or can ad- coordinated actions, or things of that sort to keep their organizations going.

Right. 

I, I would be remiss to, like, miss the opportunity to, to mention that this touches on everyone's favorite debate, which is about the professional managerial class. And I think that one thing that people often get wrong in that is, as mu- as, as much fun as it is to make fun of PMC culture and whatnot, the point is not to dismiss the entire class, right?

Mm-hmm. Yep. in any solid, like, left movement, there need to be people who have professionalized their activism in some way, right? But there are better and worse ways to do that, and the issue with the PMC is that there are structural tendencies baked into their class position that lead in bad directions, and that's the point, right?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Not that they can't do good things- Right ... not that professionalized activists, like staff organizers at unions, for instance. But not that they can't do good things, just that there are certain incentives baked into that particular position within society that oftentimes lead in the wrong direction.

Right. so, so I, now that we've covered some of the lingering bad habits of Occupy, I, I really want to ask you, because you were also both heavily involved in the Bernie Sanders campaigns, as canvassers and, phone bankers and volunteers. Do you think that the organizing around the Bernie campaigns, had a positive effect, or changed, or reoriented the American left in any way?

yes. it's hard to know where to begin to speak, and I think, I would, I would say it's first of all ideologically it introduced, universalist bread and butter demands like Medicare for All- 

Mm-hmm ... 

as being a thing that people can ask for, and organize around. 

Yeah. 

and to some extent, it really created some infrastructure for that organizing, some of which has stuck around, and some of which has faded away.

Mm-hmm. 

But I think the thing that I would focus on in thinking about, what it did, or have been thinking about is just the number of people who now have basic organizing experience and skills. 

Yeah. 

and that's just, that's just massive and hard to calculate what impact it will have, on future fights down the road.

Mm. I think something like, probably something like 95% of the people who I know today, who can host a phone bank or organize a canvas, probably got those skills through, one of the Bernie campaigns. 

Mm-hmm ... 

and I think that, that prepares us, it situates us well for future fights that we have, just massive numbers of people who can do that now who, who couldn't do that before.

Yeah. The Bernie campaigns, this is just the tip of the iceberg I think, 

Mm-hmm ... 

in terms of what, what the Bernie campaigns did for the American left

On September 17th, 2011, a lot of the people who showed up didn't really believe they would have any impact at all. That's certainly how Sandy Nurse felt when she arrived. But then she became an integral part of Occupy's direct action team because the collective power of the group inspired her so much.

And now Sandy is on the New York City Council. It's a turn she calls- 

Just bizarre and unexpected. 

After Occupy, Sandy founded a nonprofit composting service staffed by young people of color, and then joined the local community board. At some point, she was approached about running for office and agreed to try.

She was elected to the New York City Council in 2021. Being a leader in a hierarchical traditional structure and being the center of so much attention has been an adjustment. 

It's been uncomfortable. I'm a behind the scenes person. I'm not really the talking head. I was never, like, the best on a bullhorn.

like Nalini, great on a bullhorn on the stage. That's not me. 

She hasn't forgotten the power of direct action. While Sandy avoided arrest the day of Occupy's Brooklyn Bridge March, when 700 other people were arrested, she was arrested last year.

first of all, in case anybody hasn't said it, fuck ICE. 

Stop ICE in New York. Stop ICE in New York 

Sandy, along with dozens of others, had been blocking ICE vehicles from entering or leaving a federal building. ICE agents had been arresting people who were on their way to scheduled immigration court hearings.

The response to Trump's immigration crackdown has the DNA of Occupy in it. All over the country, especially as we saw in Minneapolis, people have been protecting their immigrant neighbors in similar ways. Ordinary people are engaging in direct action on a regular basis. They are disrupting ICE operations, taking up space, making noise, and many of those efforts are happening in a decentralized way, relying on crowdsourcing and encrypted technology to alert neighborhood networks when border patrol or ICE agents show up.

It has often been effective, but it has also come at a steep cost, the lives of Rene Goode and Alex Predi. The stakes are incredibly high. People are worried about their safety, worried about being separated from their children. Many of us are afraid of our own government. And again, rather than waiting for some savior, people are providing mutual aid for one another.

Manissa sees it among residents where she lives now in Washington, DC. 

At the elementary school, parents have started a walking bus where everyone signs up to walk kids home whose parents are nervous about leaving their houses, and it's a really, like, simple, sweet thing. Like, we'll pick your kids up, and we'll bring them home for you so you don't have to be worried about being out on the street where there's National Guard and ICE.

There's a lesson in solidarity and inclusivity in that one small act. 

It's a group of parents who are like, across the political spectrum, and there's something really beautiful about the, the simplicity of it that's not about, like, well, what do you think about fascism? It's just like, we gotta find a way to make sure that these kids get home.

The walking bus is a reminder that it's easiest to find common ground around the simplest things, not ideology, but people's material needs. If we want to build a big tent movement against fascism, it makes sense to start by focusing on these kinds of concrete needs. A person drowning in medical debt needs a way out of that hole.

A family whose home has been flooded needs refuge. A child needs to get home from school safely. In some ways, 2026 feels a lot like 2011. Here's Marisa again. 

There's a recession, there's a housing crisis, cost of living, and then the lack of, of political leadership and will on the part of Democrats to solve any of these problems.

When I was watching a video of the final general assembly on the night of the eviction, it struck me how little has actually changed. 

Mic check. Mic check. 

We fight. 

We fight. For those who have no voice. 

For those who have no voice. 

For the families that fall apart Because they can't pay their mortgages Because they can't pay their mortgages.

I'm here I'm here Because my siblings Because my siblings Can't pay back their student loans 

Can't pay back their student loans. 

I am here I am here Because 

Because 

My mother 

My mother Has to choose between cancer medication 

Has to choose between cancer medication And our food And our food 

Since that day in 2011, the challenges have multiplied.

The world's billionaires are four times richer than they were then. Billionaires, and now the world's first trillionaire, have an unprecedented amount of influence in elections and in the White House. The president is brazenly profiting off of his office. He repeatedly hosts pay-to-play private events and sells Trump-branded merchandise.

For everyone else, healthcare has become even less affordable. Inflation is outpacing wage growth. Many young people are deeply worried about the cost of living, and they don't trust the government to provide solutions There's plenty of frustration, anger, and sometimes hopelessness to go around, but there's also this feeling, maybe you felt it, like we're waiting for something to happen, that something will interrupt the trajectory.

Maybe it's the midterm elections. Maybe it's the MAGA movement collapsing in on itself, or maybe it's something that comes from the grassroots, something like Occupy. Movements are not linear. They zig and zag, die down, and then pop back up. Even though Occupy was labeled a failure by mainstream media and largely forgotten about, I don't think the story of Occupy is over.

I think it's ready for a sequel. In 2011, a non-violent collective action woke up the world. It's possible that we could do that again, maybe not with an occupation, but some radical collective action. 

Ideally, there's this iterative process where people integrate things and learn over time, and so it's not a matter of, like, just taking Occupy and putting it in the current moment.

That, that would be a mistake. It wouldn't go anywhere. 

Whatever it looks like, it needs to be a big tent coalition, and in a lot of ways, Occupy has prepared us to build that coalition. It helped train an army of organizers whose work continues to be guided by the principles of mutual aid, collective power, and direct action.

Here's Nicole Carty, who went on to work in social justice nonprofits after her time at Zuccotti Park. 

So much of the literal infrastructure and human infrastructure of that movement has gone on to support other movements. The networks are still really live. I still know and, like, have worked with a lot of the people that I met in Occupy.

I still see them in movement organizing and nonprofit organizing. 

And whatever it may be, the economic populism at the heart of Occupy should be the North Star. 

We definitely need something. It needs to be exciting. It needs to be joyous. It needs to be powerful. It needs to be widely accessible. It needs to happen across the country.

It needs to include red states and blue states. It needs to make people feel like they have a chance at changing things, and those are all things that Occupy did. 

to be it for today.

Be sure to check out our link in bio right in the show notes for all the ways to follow us on social platforms, contact us, and support everything Best of the Left, including membership and one-time donations.

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The special miniseries from Future Hindsight, "Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising"

This Is Hell!

Behind the News

The Indicator

The Hartmann Report

Democracy Now!

Stanford Legal

Lever Time

NYC NOW

Jacobin Radio

and The Majority Report

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show. Thanks to Ben, our Swiss Army Knife fixer behind the scenes. And thanks to those of you who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy!

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.