Occupy Wall Street Needs Goals, Or Funnel
Cake: William D. Cohan
October 09, 2011, 10:38 PM EDT
By William D. Cohan
Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Late last week, I went to the southern tip of Manhattan to see what all the
fuss is about, but discovered that the only people occupying Wall Street these days are a bunch
of tourists and the few remaining bankers who actually work there.
There wasn’t a protester in sight, in large part because three weeks into the Occupy Wall Street
movement, the New York City police no longer allow anyone remotely interested in complaining
about banker greed, income inequality or other perceived systemic injustices anywhere near the
symbolic center of capitalism. The police have connected the steel barricades that line much of
Wall and Broad streets near the New York Stock Exchange, and strategically placed late-model
SUVs at intimidating angles in the roadways. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, cars have been banned
from most of Wall and Broad. Now dissenters have been, too.
If you want to take the pulse of Occupy Wall Street, you have to head a couple of blocks north to
Zuccotti Park, a 33,000-square-foot, rather unlovely, pink-granite-covered zone named for John
Zuccotti, a former chairman of the city’s planning commission and the co-chairman of
Brookfield Office Properties Inc., one of nation’s largest real-estate developers. Brookfield owns
the World Financial Center complex across from ground zero and was runner-up to Larry
Silverstein for the right to own the 99-year lease on the World Trade Center.
Strange Neighbors
It’s probably lost on the Occupy Wall Street crowd that its home is across the street from Brown
Brothers Harriman & Co., one of the oldest private Wall Street firms around, and is named after
Zuccotti, a wealthy developer who received, according to the latest Brookfield proxy statement,
$1.3 million in compensation in 2010, has $1.5 million more in unexercised options and is also a
senior counsel for the Wall Street law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP.
Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, made the unlikely comparison of Zuccotti
Park to Egypt’s Tahrir Square, thereby bestowing upon Occupy Wall Street a degree of gravitas
and importance it doesn’t yet have. Kristof was in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring protests
and is a first-rate reporter, but it’s difficult to believe the laconic, idiosyncratic scene on display
in downtown Manhattan last week bears the slightest resemblance to what occurred in Cairo
earlier this year. There, people were fighting for their freedom. Zuccotti Park, truth be told,
seemed more like a low-energy Manhattan street fair in desperate need of funnel cake and grilled
sausages than the world-changing movement Kristof imagines it to be.
At a corner of the park were some large artworks from the Beehive Design Collective, a rural
Maine artist colony. Just inside the park, one could catch the dulcet tones of Harry Braun, the
white-haired chairman and senior scientist for the Phoenix Project Foundation, which is
dedicated to making sure people understand the consequences of unchecked growth. Braun is
running for president of the United States. His principal beef seems to be that the U.S. is not a
democracy but rather a republic ruled “by the tiny few in secret with lobbyists.” (He may be on
to something.)
In a real democracy, Braun said, “instead of raising the national debt limit, the U.S. Congress
would be instructed by the majority of citizens to cancel the tax cuts for the wealthiest
Americans and any further secret banker bailouts” and return tax rates on the wealthiest
Americans to 91 percent, as they were during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
Good luck with the campaign, Harry!
Sleeping Bag Economics
Near Braun, a young bearded fellow was getting an afternoon shave. Another young guy was
massaging his bare foot where an ugly looking sore had opened up. A woman was playing with
her pet squirrel, much to the delight of a group of kids. Other protesters were sacked out --
obviously exhausted from their ongoing vigil -- for the first time in sleeping bags, thanks to the
collective decision at the previous night’s loosely organized general assembly to spend $2,000 of
its $25,000 in cash on those luxury items.
Nearby, another young man, probably in college, was doing his economics homework by writing
out mathematical formulas on a small whiteboard. At the far end of the park, there was bit of
performance art -- people lying on the ground for 30 minutes, staying still and silent, while
looking up at the sky.
Just to the side of the silent sky watchers, I met Michael Badger, a youthful 38-year-old New
Yorker, and one of the leaders of the protest’s “coaching” effort. He and a few other “coaches”
were attempting to help the protesters achieve their loosely defined goals -- not that any have
been officially sanctioned, of course. He said he helped one woman who thought it would be a
good idea if Occupy Wall Street arranged to have office space, “where we could all move into,”
to help it get things done. He said he had no idea what became of the woman or her idea.
Badger, an energetic straight-talker who was one of the 700 protesters arrested Oct. 1 when they
tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, said he had no understanding of what Wall Street does or how
it greases the wheels of commerce. He felt a little uncomfortable admitting that fact, then
confided that he did not know what issues the group wants addressed, nor did he seem to care
that much.
“Asking people here where this is going or what our demands are is like asking a patient to tell a
doctor what his treatment should be,” Badger said. “We’re just here pointing out the symptoms
of the problem.” It is hard to imagine that statement being made in Tahrir Square.
Last week an unnamed Wall Street CEO called Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times,
and asked him if there was anything to fear from this protest. The obvious answer -- no -- doesn’t
provide the full picture. This group is much too amorphous, uninformed and disparate -- like a
tropical storm sitting in the Caribbean unable to organize itself into a hurricane -- to pose any
near-term existential threat to “the system.”
Frustration Builds
But in the longer term, peoples’ increasing frustration -- with the fact that trillions of dollars have
gone to the rich while close to nothing has gone to the poor and middle class; with the fact that
the so-called “job creators” are not creating any jobs; and with the fact that Wall Street still
seems oblivious to the role it played in bringing all this about, while not much has changed there
-- is starting to get some serious traction.
As I was leaving the park, I ran into David Carr, the Times’ eagle-eyed media columnist. We fell
into step together. He said he was sensing a Tea Party-like movement in its early stages. He said
he was a romantic about these kinds of historical moments and was especially impressed by the
four-page broadsheet -- “The Occupied Wall Street Journal” -- that the protesters had somehow
put together and were handing out in the park (donations encouraged, of course). He seemed
inspired by what he saw. I told him I wasn’t all that impressed.
“All nascent political movements start out aimless and amorphous,” he said convincingly, before
breaking away and heading into the McDonald’s, one block north of Zuccotti Park.
(William D. Cohan, a former investment banker and the author of “Money and Power: How
Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.)
--Editors: Stacey Shick, Mary Duenwald