Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising: The Invitation (Ep. 1)

Optimist Economy

This episode of 'Optimist Economy' explores the origins and impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement through personal stories and historical context. It examines how a

Key takeaways

• The 2008 financial crisis disproportionately harmed ordinary citizens while bailing out Wall Street banks, creating widespread resentment.
• Occupy Wall Street emerged as a response to systemic injustice, transforming anger into collective action and inspiring broader social movements.

Main topics

• Occupy Wall Street movement
• 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath

Notable quotes

If you can't afford childcare or can't afford to take a sick day. That's not just your bad luck. It's actually bad for our economy.

Conclusion

The Occupy movement, though ultimately suppressed, demonstrated the power of collective action and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) If you can't afford childcare or can't afford to take a sick day. That's not just your bad luck. It's actually bad for our economy. I'm Katherine Ann Edwards, an economist. And I'm editor Robin Rousey. On our podcast, Optimist Economy, I break down how our lives intersect with the economy, whether it's wages, social security, the national debt. And I ask the questions that you're actually thinking, like, is AI going to take my job? Americans deserve a better economy than the one we have. So let's talk about how to get there. every Tuesday on Optimist Economy, wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:36) Future hindsight. Zuccotti Park is a tiny plaza in Manhattan's financial district. A small rectangle of concrete and granite surrounded on every side by skyscrapers. It's mostly a spot for office workers to smoke a cigarette or eat a quick falafel while they scroll on their phones. Speaker 1 (1:03) After dark, when the offices have emptied out and the surrounding shops and restaurants are closed, the park gets quiet. Even a little eerie. Usually. But on the night of November 15, 2011, Zuccotti Park was buzzing with tension and fear. Dozens of tents were set up among the grid of carefully landscaped trees, sheltering about 200 activists. They had come to occupy the park as both a political statement and a social experiment, determined to stay as long as they could. It had been 59 days. But now, As the 60th day of the occupation was approaching, hundreds of police officers began swarming the park. Speaker 3 (1:52) All right, is everyone here? The city now, right now, we're being Speaker 6 (1:54) raided at Occupy Wall Street. Please start tweeting as many people as possible and letting folks know. Occupy Wall Street is being raided. Speaker 1 (2:02) As the cops surrounded them, the occupiers had a live stream going. They sent out a call for help to their network of supporters across the city. Speaker 2 (2:12) It was the middle of the night, and suddenly phone calls, text messages, like all these notifications. My phone just blew the hell up. And it's like, the park is being raided now. We need people now. Speaker 1 (2:25) Hundreds of supporters began rushing to Zuccotti Park as the occupiers tried to hold ground. Speaker 8 (2:31) The cops are like right in front of us. A wall of cops in riot gear. They've got the shields and they're fully weaponized. and we look like a bunch of hippies. There's Speaker 2 (2:44) people screaming everywhere. Like, literally, tents are being torn apart with knives. They're throwing people's stuff over their heads. They're going through tents and throwing them out. Speaker 3 (2:52) All my shit's in there. All my friends are in there. It's my fucking home. Speaker 1 (2:59) Supporters began arriving, ready to join what had essentially become a giant sit-in. But the cops had blocked off streets and installed barricades around the park. The cab came in closer and closer to Zuccotti. There was police everywhere. Roads Speaker 3 (3:15) were blocked. It felt like a war zone. The cab driver was scared, so we're like, don't go any further. We'll get out and walk. Speaker 7 (3:21) I was like, let me out. And I ran the rest of the way. I was trying to get over these things. I was like, how do I climb over this? I was trying to do parkour. Soon, Speaker 1 (3:30) an enormous crowd of people protesting the raid surrounded the park. They locked arms, blocking police vans and watching as the police arrested the occupiers. Tension and rage ticked up. Speaker 3 (3:44) Get him back on the floor! Speaker 1 (4:03) Sukkotty Park was the nucleus of the Occupy movement, the first American movement driven by social media. The Occupiers had slept in the park for almost two months through the rain and snow. They had been infiltrated, pepper sprayed, and made fun of by the mainstream media. But their message, that the capitalist system was rigged to benefit the 1 % and exploit the rest of us, that message had resonated from the moment they set up camp in the park. Speaker 3 (4:33) What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in a park near the New Speaker 5 (4:37) York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters. Speaker 2 (4:40) The crowd swelled dramatically as labor unions and college students added their voices. Protests against Wall Street continue to grow across the country. Occupy Wall Street has become Occupy the World. Speaker 1 (4:54) Occupy Wall Street came on the heels of a devastating economic crash that was caused by corporate greed, but paid for by millions of regular people who lost their homes, jobs, and retirement savings. Our political leaders bailed out the banks by using taxpayer dollars. Basically, regular working people had to foot the bill for corporate greed, and Occupy was able to channel the widespread rage. frustration and despair into something inspiring. It's hard to explain why it exploded so dramatically and then flamed out so quickly. But looking back, it's clear that Occupy changed the way Americans understood capitalism. It punctured the myth that hard work is all it takes to get ahead. Politicians like Bernie Sanders, who embraced the idea of the 99%, suddenly became icons. Occupy Wall Street truly kicked off an era of protests and populist politics that have, in many ways, led us to the strange moment we're in today. And today, well, we're in a very dark place. Donald Trump is marching us steadily toward full authoritarianism, and our political leaders on both the left and right seem incapable of, or unwilling, to stop it. But that Occupy energy... That recognition that no one is coming to save us, so we better save ourselves. That energy is bubbling up again, just like it did in 2011. We again have an economic crisis, a war in the Middle East, and no one seems to be looking out for regular working people. Understanding the story of Occupy can help us figure out how to harness that grassroots power more effectively than we have before. And I want to know. What did Occupy get right? And what did it get wrong? What can we learn from its successes and failures that might help us build a new movement against fascism? From Future Hindsight, I'm your host, Mila Atmos. And this is Occupy, an unfinished uprising. Episode 1, The Invitation. Speaker 1 (7:13) The Occupy movement starts with the story of a generation whose promise had been abruptly halted when the economy crashed in 2008. The Speaker 2 (7:23) 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. Speaker 3 (7:35) Bailing out Wall Street is the only Speaker 8 (7:37) way to save Main Street. So says the president. The signs were everywhere, but now it's official. We are in a recession. Speaker 1 (7:47) 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 $1 million 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 and Afro-Latina woman. Speaker 7 (9:10) My mother went bankrupt during the financial crisis. We were served an eviction notice from our apartment. Like, all of these things came crashing down, and I never was comfortable about saying it. Speaker 1 (9:20) 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. Speaker 7 (9:29) I was like, why is there only this amount of food in the fridge? I didn't feel like 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? Speaker 1 (9:41) 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