New York Youth Like “Rebel Diaz” Are Making Their Presence Felt in the Wall Street Occupation

America has been a slumbering giant but recent events in the streets are showing us signs that the country may be awakening. The Arab Spring, the atrocities in Syria and Bahrain, the urban unrest in France and London, the economic meltdowns in Greece and southern Europe, the threats to the Euro-Zone, and the ongoing, grinding, and bloody warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq…  all these America has observed in its living rooms, on television — each person, each family, seemingly in timid isolation from each other.

Not any more.  Now, everyone knows that the American middle class has had no increase in its real wages for thirty years, that the poor grow desperately poor, with poverty in America reaching historic levels, that the Democrats and the Republicans are in the hands of those who have grown extremely wealthy in the past three decades, paralyzing the political system with what is known in the USA as “special interest politics.”

What’s more, the Great Recession is having a particularly cruel impact on America’s youth.  Young Americans have bleak job prospects, even if they are lucky enough to obtain a decent education.  Education costs are now so high that young people can ill afford to pay back the debts that they must obtain to pay for school.  Plus the youth of today will be saddled with the task of paying back the enormous debts of contemporary America’s political system:  debts for which they are not responsible.  The French statesman and activist Stéphane Hessel, thinking on similar problems in Europe, is calling on the youth of today to peacefully “get indignant”! Three million copies of his book have been sold so far.

Americans of modest incomes have seen their wages go nowhere while millions of them have also lost their homes in an unprecedented frenzy of “predatory” lending that unscrupulous banks and mortgage companies inflicted on them. During the 1990s and early 2000s, underprivileged neighborhoods, particularly of Latinos, were targeted for high interest mortgages, even though lenders knew that these people owned few assets to fall back on should there be any problem, such as the head of the family losing his or her job. These types of bank and mortgage company representatives received their salaries whether or not the mortgages were paid. Then, such badly made mortgages were “bundled” into financial instruments and sold on the open market to towns, pension funds, and other organizations who depend on the ratings agencies, like Moodys and Standard & Poor, for guarantees on their reliability.  Yet the larger banks pay the agencies’ fees for their ratings research!  The crash came in 2008. Bush and now Obama saved the failing super-banks with the famous “bailout.”  But the economic turmoil goes on:  people losing their homes, jobs, and income, with a very limited welfare state to fall back on.

Millions of Americans are asking, “Where’s the bailout for the rest of us?”  Youth groups, unions, peace activists, greens, middle class professionals, members of neighborhood associations, students, intellectuals, journalists, small businesspeople, and artists are finding their voices and have occupied Wall Street, the heart of America’s big bank system, for over three weeks.  This occupation, complete with working groups handling donations, finance, outreach, internet, sanitation, medical assistance, direct action, and food,  as well as producing the “Occupied Wall Street Journal,” has no plans to end soon. Ordinary citizens are sending them food and support from all over.  Similar occupations are now happening in financial districts across America.

Last weekend, one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history occurred when New York City police handcuffed over 700 peaceful demonstrators who were walking, in a protest of solidarity, across the Brooklyn Bridge:

(Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)

On Wednesday, October 5, hip-hoppers “Rebel Diaz” analyzed the unfolding story in real time, “busting a rhyme” in a video recorded near Wall Street on  Youtube.

Exactly like the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s, this autumn American street movement has a number of tendencies.  Now, in its first stages, many mainstream media observers either trivialize the protesters or complain that they don’t seem to have a clear, unified message.  Meanwhile, the official response in the cities is quite different. In New York, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s police force has arrested hundreds and beaten peaceful protesters with police sticks while spraying them with pepper spray.  In Boston, by contrast, Mayor Menino’s police force has taken a more tolerant approach in its handling of peaceful street protest.  After all, American cities are in a financial bind because budgets for public workers, including police, firemen, and ambulance workers, are being slashed everywhere as the recession drastically diminishes tax revenues.  It will be interesting to watch how these crucial public servants will behave should the protests grow larger and spread to more cities.  The protesters want the jobs and salaries of such workers protected too.

Perhaps one may read too positively the new street reality.  Many questions remain.  Where will this new movement go?  How can older people join and support the bright, creative, and energetic young people whom they see in the newspapers and (finally) on commercial TV?  How can we break the impasse between the Republicans and Democrats in Washington and stop the flood of money corrupting the political system with a street movement that, so far, is not united behind a clearly articulated cause or list of demands?  How can we “sack” the ratings agencies and curb the excesses of the super-banks that are “too big to fail”?  What is the relationship between what’s happening in the streets and the long needed effort to move America in a more positive direction?

In these dark days of the Great Recession, however, I am personally heartened.  There are signs of sophisticated, peaceful, youth protest coming from America’s streets, and there is no doubt that it is important.

Biorn Maybury-Lewis