Bolstering the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, protesters have recently obtained a donated storage space in Downtown Manhattan, to allow demonstrators to have supplies as their protest enters the cold months. NY1’s Zack Fink got an exclusive look at the warehouse and filed the following report.
Just a few blocks away from Zuccotti Park, where protesters have entered their second month of holding “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations, the United Federation of Teachers is allowing occupiers to use a ground-floor storage space for donated goods.
Care packages and supplies have come from all over the world to the UPS store at Fulton Street. Organizers then carry the packages, which include food and medicine, on dollies to the storage area.
“We’ve literally seen donations from all over the world, from New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, Latin America, anywhere you can imagine,” said protester Han Shan.
“It is important that we have a place, especially with the weather, basically Mother Nature being herself. We have to store this stuff,” said protester Nan Terry.
The space also allows protesters to store personal items, keeping them warm and dry.
Some of the donations have even included winter gloves and socks, all necessary items to brave the cold as the protest stretches on towards the colder months.
“We are not asking permission to be here. We are occupying Wall Street. I don’t think anyone has any intention of going anywhere,” said Shan. “We’ve got a lot more work to do.”
At the Occupy St. Pete protest held yesterday in one of Florida’s more liberal cities, almost 400 people turned out to the first Occupy event. They had their stories about why they were there, and what they hoped to accomplish.
Ogini Montaya, a tall skinny guy with a painted face, shook his head. “Yeah, I should have read the fine print,” the 30-year-old electrician said. But when the work dried up along with the housing boom, it seemed like a good idea to go back to school.
Unfortunately for the husband and father of two, he chose a trade school whose counselor a/k/a sales rep assured him any credits earned at the school would transfer to a local college. “I even got it in writing,” he told me, rueful. “They lied to me, dead to my face.
“I got a 3.5 GPA, spent $40,000 in two years. It’s worthless.” He said his wife was now supporting the family, “working 12 hours a day to keep us afloat. I called (Sen.) Bill Nelson’s office and he said, “What do you want me to do about it?”
Austin Mann, 60, has lived in St. Pete for 22 years. “These people who make money getting bailed out by the government when they ran it into the ground – in my business career, if I messed up, I got fired and I certainly didn’t get a bonus,” he said.
He says he used to own a large nursery in Tampa, but the opening of a Home Depot hurt his business. “After Lowe’s opened, too, it was a death knell,” he said.
I spotted Christine Langlois, 59, a nurse in scrubs and carrying a sign proclaiming “Corporate Greed – A sure cure for happiness.” The Bradenton resident said she turned out to show her support for everyone “feeling the pinch of the economy and corporate greed.”
She said she was making the same amount of money she made in 1998 “and I can’t save.”
Langlois left nursing for a more lucrative career in business, but returned to nursing after the economy crashed. “I’d kept up my license. At least I could get a job,” she said. She’s supposed to be a full-time hospital employee, but says last week they called her and told her not to come in for her usual 12-hour shift. “How am I supposed to pay my bills when I don’t know from one week to the next how many hours I’ll work?” she said. “The people at the top are getting all the money, and the 99% aren’t seeing it.”
Another healthcare worker, Jennifer Romanelli, was there because she was “tired of being lied to by the people who are supposed to represent us.” The 28-year-old said she was for the “solidarity” and hoped the Occupy movement could make things mutually beneficial “for everyone, not just those people who are controlling the pursestrings.”
Ricki Bloom, a 29-year-old social worker, was skeptical. “I want to see if we can get some goals,” she said. “I’m wondering if we’re just protesting, or if people will get something done.” Her friend Cat Smith, 28, had more immediate concerns. “I work in a health food store, serving the bourgeoisie,” she said. “I don’t have health care, and I can’t make ends meet. I’m here to support any solutions.”
Another friend, Courtney Rowles, 24, works in a halfway house. “I’m here to check out the scene, see what actions and long-term goals they come up with,” she said.
“It’s a shame it had to wait until the privileged classes had to feel the consequences of what capitalism and Wall Street has always been doing to everyone else.”
Publicly, bankers say they understand the anger at Wall Street — but believe they are misunderstood by the protesters camped on their doorstep.
But when they speak privately, it is often a different story.
“Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager.
“It’s not a middle-class uprising,” adds another veteran bank executive. “It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”
As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have grown and spread to other cities, an open question is: Do the bankers get it? Their different worldview speaks volumes about the wide chasms that have opened over who is to blame for the continuing economic malaise and what is best for the country.
Some on Wall Street viewed the protesters with disdain, and a degree of caution, as hundreds marched through the financial district on Friday. Others say they feel their pain, but are befuddled about what they are supposed to do to ease it. A few even feel personally attacked, and say the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been in Zuccotti Park for weeks are just bitter about their own economic fate and looking for an easy target. If anything, they say, people should show some gratitude.
“Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”
He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. “They need to understand who their constituency is,” he said.
Generally, bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire — or the masses to their doorsteps. “Anybody who dismisses them publicly is putting a bull’s-eye on their back,” the hedge fund manager said.
Today, over 900 cities in 80 countries staged Occupy protests. The focus of them here is the planned Times Square Thousands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters have streamed into Times Square while cops try to contain the crowd. They are arresting people and putting them into vans. More added later.
Concise and sensible, and almost certainly unacceptable to the thieves who wrecked the economy:
1. Break up the monopolies.There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled. 2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. 3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer’s own money to lobby against him. 4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break. 5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later.
Oh, look. Greg Sargent informs us that not only do most people understand what the Occupy movement is about, the majority of them support it:
Americans favor Occupy Wall Street far more than Tea Party: Despite nonstop GOP and conservative disparagement of the Wall Street protests, the most detailed polling yet on Occupy Wall Street suggests that the public holds a broadly favorable view of the movement — and, crucially, the positions it holds.
Time released a new poll this morning finding that 54 percent view the Wall Street protests favorably, versus only 23 percent who think the opposite. Interestingly, only 23 percent say they don’t have an opinion, suggesting the protests have succeeded in punching through to the mainstream. Also: The most populist positions espoused by Occupy Wall Street — that the gap between rich and poor has grown too large; that taxes should be raised on the rich; that execs responsible for the meltdown should be prosecuted — all have strong support.
Meanwhile, the poll found that only 27 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party. My handy Plum Line calculator tells me that this amounts to half the number of those who view Occupy Wall Street favorably. In fairness, the Tea Party has been in existence since before the 2010 elections, and even has had a seat at the governing table during the debt ceiling and government shutdown debacles, which clearly took their toll on the Tea Party’s image. Occupy Wall Street is just getting started. But it does seem clear that a confluence of events — the protests, Obama’s jobs push, Elizabeth Warren’s Senate candidacy, and the national backlash from the right all these things have provoked — are pushing populist issues such as fair taxation and income inequality to the forefront of the national conversation.
It turns out we don’t live in Tea Party Nation, after all.
