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

Loading summary

Transcript143 lines

[00:01]
Marissa Holmes
If you can't afford childcare or can't afford to take a sick day, that's
[00:05]
Mila Atmos
not just your bad luck. It's actually bad for our economy.
[00:08]
Marissa Holmes
I'm Katherine Ann Edwards, an economist, and
[00:10]
Mila Atmos
I'm editor Robin Rousey.
[00:12]
Sandy Nurse
On our podcast Optimist Economy, I break down how our lives intersect with the
[00:16]
Mila Atmos
economy, whether it's wages, Social Security, the national debt. And I ask the questions that you're
[00:21]
Marissa Holmes
actually thinking, like, is AI going to take my job? Americans deserve a better economy than the one we have.
[00:27]
Sandy Nurse
So let's talk about how to get
[00:28]
Mila Atmos
there every Tuesday on Optimist Economy wherever
[00:31]
Marissa Holmes
you listen to podcast.
[00:37]
Mila Atmos
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. 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. All right, just say no.
[01:54]
Sandy Nurse
Right now.
[01:55]
Mila Atmos
We're being raided at Occupy Wall Street. Please start tweeting as many people as possible and letting folks know Occupy Wall street is being raided. As the cops surrounded them, the occupiers had a livestream going. They sent out a call for help to their network of supporters across the city.
[02:13]
Nathan Schneider
It was the middle of the night,
[02:14]
Mila Atmos
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. Hundreds of supporters began rushing to Zuccotti park as the occupiers tried to hold ground.
[02:32]
Astra Taylor
The cops are, like, right in front of us. A wall of cops in riot gear.
[02:37]
Marissa Holmes
They've got the, you know, the shields,
[02:39]
Mila Atmos
and they're fully weaponized.
[02:41]
Astra Taylor
And we look like a bunch of hippies.
[02:44]
Mila Atmos
There's people screaming everywhere. Like, literally, tents are being torn apart with knives.
[02:49]
Sandy Nurse
They're throwing people's stuff over their heads as they're going through tents, just throwing them out.
[02:53]
Marissa Holmes
All my shit's in there.
[02:54]
Sandy Nurse
All my friends are in there.
[02:57]
Marissa Holmes
That's my fucking home.
[03:00]
Mila Atmos
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 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.
[03:22]
Nalini Stamp
I was like, let me out. And I, like, 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.
[03:30]
Mila Atmos
Soon, 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. Get him back on the floor. Get him on the side.
[03:49]
Astra Taylor
You.
[03:51]
Mila Atmos
Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Zuccotti 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. What started as less than a dozen
[04:35]
Astra Taylor
college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock exchange is now hundreds of protesters.
[04:40]
Mila Atmos
The crowds swelled dramatically as labor unions and college students added their voices. Protests against Wall street continued to grow across the country. Occupy Wall street has become Occupy the world. Occupy Wall street came on the heels of a devastating economic crash that was caused by corpor 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 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 fail fascism from future hindsight, I'm your host Mila Atmos, and this is an unfinished uprising. Episode 1 the Invitation the Occupy movement starts with the story of a generation whose promise had been abruptly halted when the economy crashed in 2008.
[07:23]
Nathan Schneider
The housing market collapse created one financial
[07:26]
Mila Atmos
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.
[07:42]
Astra Taylor
But now it's official.
[07:43]
Mila Atmos
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 $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.
[09:11]
Nalini Stamp
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.
[09:21]
Mila Atmos
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.
[09:30]
Nalini Stamp
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?
[09:42]
Mila Atmos
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.
[10:02]
Nalini Stamp
I have a good enough degree 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.
[10:15]
Mila Atmos
Then there's Sandy Nurse. She was born in Panama to two Navy sailors, a white American mother and a black Panamanian father.
[10:24]
Sandy Nurse
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, almost my entire childhood, moving around the world and seeing the reactions to that, the consequences of that.
[10:48]
Mila Atmos
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 like a promising career in humanitarian aid.
[11:01]
Sandy Nurse
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.
[11:20]
Mila Atmos
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.
[11:44]
Sandy Nurse
The thing that really just kind of snapped for me 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 like a Backhoe or like a big claw caterpillar thing. These women are just moving these boulders. And I just said, this shit is. This is not for me. Like, 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 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 Americanism.
[12:36]
Mila Atmos
And so Sandy quit that whole endeavor, gave up on that career path to take a less ethically fraught job.
[12:42]
Sandy Nurse
My family was upset and didn't understand what I was doing. And they were like, you're like a bike. You're like a food delivery person now.
[12:50]
Mila Atmos
So summer of 2011, she was delivering food to residents of gentrified Brooklyn and, and trying to figure out her place in the world.
[12:58]
Sandy Nurse
And it just so happened at that moment Occupy came about.
[13:02]
Mila Atmos
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 like Sandy or Nalini. Maybe it's her Midwestern roots.
[13:19]
Marissa Holmes
I grew up in central Ohio in a small town that kind of became a suburb. And my parents had been involved in like Democratic party politics mostly. I mean, they definitely talked about politics like constantly.
[13:37]
Mila Atmos
Her dad was actually a labor lawyer for a time.
[13:40]
Marissa Holmes
I was in high school when 911 happened.
[13:46]
Mila Atmos
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.
[14:04]
Marissa Holmes
I learned about, you know, politics and how power works and how to organize first, you know, from my parents, and then became more radicalized in the context of the anti war movement.
[14:17]
Mila Atmos
From then on, she was a dedicated activist. By the summer of 2011, Marissa 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.
[14:39]
Marissa Holmes
It was a long, hot August in the summer of 2011, and we met under the Hare Krishna tree in Tompkins Square Park.
[14:48]
Mila Atmos
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
[15:13]
Marissa Holmes
of Thomas Square Park. There's a rather large tree, and with roots that kind of extend out into the concrete and break it up. And people go there to meditate and play music and just be together.
[15:29]
Mila Atmos
This huge elm tree was the site of the first Hare Ka 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.
[15:44]
Marissa Holmes
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, you know, operating on anarchist time, people are generally late.
[16:01]
Mila Atmos
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.
[17:07]
Astra Taylor
There was not a lot of social movement energy.
[17:11]
Mila Atmos
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.
[17:27]
Astra Taylor
It was an incredibly demoralizing experience to protest in the aughts. I mean, typically what would happen is the cops would kettle you, which means that they would sort of wrap your protests 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 kind of prankster, disruptive spirit on the Internet.
[17:51]
Mila Atmos
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 like 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 Occupy Wall Street. 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 are Anonymous. On September 17, 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 and a plurality of voices who 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 are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not perdia. We do not forget Wall Street. Expect us. The editors at Adbusters had made it clear that they only wanted to instigate, not organize. And certainly Anonymous wasn't used to IRL actions. For Marissa's group of anarchists, the New York City General assembly, it was like they'd been given a save the date for a party they'd been thinking about throwing but hadn't fully committed to yet. But now that someone else had announced an actual time and place, they decided to go with it. They created a plan for the first day and hoped that people would show up. And really, that was the big question. Would online enthusiasm translate into the real world? Would people actually show up? Astra was skeptical.
[21:05]
Astra Taylor
It was a pretty bleak time to be a leftist, despite the fact that we were in an economic Meltdown. There was mass foreclosures, there was mass joblessness, economic insecurity. The left wasn't mobilizing, but the right was.
[21:22]
Mila Atmos
From Washington, D.C. to Connecticut to Wisconsin
[21:25]
Nathan Schneider
and all over the country, thousands of
[21:28]
Mila Atmos
people came out to protest government spending.
[21:34]
Astra Taylor
The Tea Party got off the ground in 2009.
[21:38]
Mila Atmos
The Tea Party movement was a right wing populist uprising. They protested both the bank bailouts and government efforts to help distressed homeowners and unemployed people, which they viewed as government handouts to undeserving poor people. And so they showed up en masse on tax day to protest government spending.
[21:59]
Astra Taylor
Over half a million people across the country attended these tax day protests. People were angry about the bank bailouts, they were angry about the economy. They were feeling insecure. And it was channeled into this right wing, reactionary, racist movement. It was like, how can we be in a situation akin to the Great Depression and the populist right is mobilizing and progressives and the left are nowhere to be found?
[22:21]
Mila Atmos
But now there was a call to respond from the left that seemed to have some traction. It was late, three years after the economic crash, but at least there was something. And it promised to be noisy and disruptive and maybe a little nuts. A call to camp out on Wall street for as long as they could as a way to bring attention to how unfair it was that regular people had borne the brunt of a financial crash brought on by Wall street greed. It was something that, well, Astra didn't help plan and didn't think was gonna work.
[22:54]
Astra Taylor
But the fact that there was crickets on our side after this incre. Incredible betrayal of the country by these bankers and by the politicians of both parties who are bailing them out and leaving people to suffer, it just felt like, well, we have to do something. And that was enough of a motivation to get me to show up at something that I wasn't particularly optimistic about.
[23:18]
Mila Atmos
Perhaps it was only because Occupy was kind of the only game in town. But our cynics, Sandy and Aline, that I introduced to you earlier, were curious.
[23:27]
Sandy Nurse
I had been following online a little bit, and one of my best friends, both of us, were kind of these gloom and doom, disillusioned, apathetic, hate political culture. We had that kind of a summer. We were just kind of reveling in the futileness of everything. And so we were kind of following along and we just decided, oh, we're gonna go down there on the first day. Let's just check it out.
[23:50]
Nalini Stamp
I was approached by a lot of White people about Occupy Wall street, like, in the months before. And I was like, why would I choose to sleep outside?
[23:58]
Sandy Nurse
What?
[23:59]
Nalini Stamp
Like, what is this white shit? To be honest, that was my like. I was like, what is this sleeping outside? Like, by choice? I thought it was insane.
[24:13]
Mila Atmos
The day to occupy arrived. September 17, 2011, a Saturday. Marissa and a bunch of the other hardcore activists were ready to set up camp outside the New York Stock Exchange.
[24:28]
Marissa Holmes
I Woke up around 8 o' clock and packed my backpack, which was quite large. I'm like five, two, and it was probably like, 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.
[24:51]
Mila Atmos
Since they couldn't actually get to the stock exchange. Marissa 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.
[25:21]
Nalini Stamp
I felt like I was in the movie Hair. It was very, like, hippie dippy. I was political to the point of doing stuff, but I never was like, I'm an anarchist or a socialist. Like, I just care that the rich have too much money. I knew it in my bones that, like, rich people, corporations, like, they're crazy, and I was an injustice. But I just looked around and was like, yeah, I'm gonna be here for, like, an hour.
[25:42]
Mila Atmos
Eventually, the festival part of it all that Nalini really wasn't feeling transitioned into something deeper and more personal.
[25:49]
Marissa Holmes
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 like, what world do you want to 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 want to live in?
[26:10]
Mila Atmos
Astra arrived in time for the small group conversations.
[26:15]
Astra Taylor
What was so striking to me and caught my imagination out the gate was that instead of standing there and chanting, which would have been a kind of conventional thing to do, I mean, 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 with, like, such a break with the usual script, because instead of standing sort of outside the New York Stock Exchange and saying, you know, you suck, and shouting at it. We were actually building bonds with each other.
[26:57]
Marissa Holmes
People had all kinds of stories. Like, they had hitchhiked across the country and had nothing. Like, had no job, no money, just, you know, used whatever they could to get to the occupation. And there was this, like, palpable sense of rage, like this simmering rage that people wanted to unleash. People had been waiting for years to say something, and they finally could say it.
[27:26]
Mila Atmos
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 like hers from other people.
[27:45]
Nalini Stamp
What shifted for me was that general assembly that first night and people getting up and telling their stories.
[27:52]
Mila Atmos
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.
[28:10]
Nalini Stamp
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, like, we were all told we had to go to college to get a better job. And somebody was like, and I'm working at Starbucks. Not that it's like, you know, solidarity with the Starbucks workers union, but, like, that wasn't what we were told you go to college for, right?
[28:30]
Mila Atmos
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 sort of confession, there was this.
[28:42]
Marissa Holmes
This sense of hope. We know how bad it is, and we just need to come together and build this space, and, like, 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.
[29:01]
Mila Atmos
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. They 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.
[29:23]
Nalini Stamp
This whole, like, hands thing, twinkle fingers. I was like, okay, this is gonna be wild.
[29:28]
Mila Atmos
But she was, in spite of herself, inspired. She stood up to speak at one
[29:33]
Nalini Stamp
point, I remember getting up. I don't remember what I said. I think I was like, 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 like, whatever's happening, I like it, and I'm gonna do what needs to be done.
[29:50]
Mila Atmos
That moment of cynicism turning to optimism was happening for other people at the park too, including Sandy, who had arrived with friends.
[29:59]
Sandy Nurse
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.
[30:11]
Mila Atmos
Of course, the powers that be wanted them out of the park in the spirit of direct democracy. Their decision to stay or go was up to the group and as a whole. So Marissa took a bullhorn to make an announcement.
[30:24]
Marissa Holmes
A really amazing process, direct democracy. But we recognize that this is a specific group, a gathering that we have here. And we want to hear from people here to see how we can proceed tonight. So one of our first orders of business is, are we going to stay or not?
[30:43]
Mila Atmos
She passed the bullhorn to someone else from the facilitation team. I'm here with some logistical information. This square.
[30:51]
Nathan Schneider
This square is technically a privately owned square.
[31:01]
Mila Atmos
We have been in contact with the property owner who has told us that
[31:06]
Nathan Schneider
his intention is to not allow people to sleep in this park tonight.
[31:12]
Mila Atmos
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.
[31:25]
Marissa Holmes
Facilitation team
[31:29]
Mila Atmos
sensing dissenting. That people want.
[31:32]
Sandy Nurse
That people want.
[31:33]
Mila Atmos
Stay here. Stay here and occupy this square. And occupy this square.
[31:39]
Sandy Nurse
How do you feel about that?
[31:44]
Mila Atmos
This was a moment for each individual, Sandy, Astra, Nalini, and everyone else to decide would they stay or would they go? Sandy.
[31:55]
Sandy Nurse
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. I mean, 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.
[32:17]
Mila Atmos
Meanwhile, somewhere else in the park, Nalini was making the same decision.
[32:21]
Nalini Stamp
Me and my friends, we were like, you're gonna sleep here? We're like, yeah.
[32:24]
Mila Atmos
Astra made a different choice.
[32:26]
Astra Taylor
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 going to go, okay, kids, you've had enough. Like, you know, we're going to beat the shit out of you. That's what I thought was about to happen, and I didn't want to be there for that.
[32:53]
Mila Atmos
Marissa was anxiously watching the police in riot gear.
[32:57]
Marissa Holmes
I was terrified because I didn't feel like we had prepared enough. I really. I felt this sense of responsibility. So I was both excited and terrified of what would come next.
[33:10]
Mila Atmos
Nathan Schneider, a journalist who had been covering activism in the city, was there.
[33:15]
Nathan Schneider
There had been a few thousand people there that day, but by this point, it was dark. New York has this kind of eerie feeling in these sections of the city where not a lot of people are out at night. It's in these corridors of office buildings. And so by this point, there were just 100, maybe 200 at most, if that, protesters sitting in this park surrounded by police. It was a very scary moment in the dark.
[33:43]
Mila Atmos
In that moment of tension, he witnessed some kind of exchange between what seemed like the property owners and the nypd.
[33:51]
Nathan Schneider
I saw a Suburban roll up a police vehicle. You know, someone was talking to the officers who were there. I think I saw Police Commissioner Kelly. Something that was said in that exchange, in that moment said, okay, this is not going to be an attack. The police surrounding this park had made the decision to let it be. And after that, the tension kind of reduced.
[34:17]
Mila Atmos
People started to fall asleep. Here's Nalini again.
[34:20]
Nalini Stamp
I just got too tired, and we all, like, fell asleep on the ground. It got cold. I didn't bring anything.
[34:25]
Mila Atmos
And Sandy, one of my friends, drove
[34:28]
Sandy Nurse
to Yonkers to get us blankets. I don't know why he went that far, but he's like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna make sure you all have blankets. And went up to Yonkers and came back with all these blankets.
[34:37]
Nalini Stamp
And then in the middle of the night, a fairy comes, I swear to God, just drops blankets over us. And that was the moment when I was like, okay, yeah, we might not know what we're doing, but we'll figure shit out for each other.
[34:53]
Mila Atmos
Occupy is a story of the improbable becoming possible. A story of hopelessness and cynicism making way for inspiration and collective action. It was clear from that very first day that Occupy had tapped into something that Nalini, Sandy, Marissa, and thousands of others had all been feeling. They were understandably Furious with the Wall street bankers who crashed the economy. And they felt betrayed by the political leaders who enabled, and some would say rewarded it. But Occupy was a lot more than an opportunity to rage at the system. Anger wasn't the thing that kept people coming back for 59 days to sleep on the concrete. There was some other magic happening that had something to do with the energizing force of collective action. It's that the energy, the inspiration that's most interesting to me. Is there a way to harness that Again, Occupy was also a social experiment. They weren't just there to protest. They were trying to create an anarchist, anti capitalist utopia inside that tiny park. And against all odds, people across the United States set up their own occupations and copied what the radicals in New York City were doing. In this way, Zuccotti park became a testing ground for a set of ideals that the organizers had arrived. Leaderlessness, radical inclusivity, direct democracy. At the beginning, it wasn't at all clear if any of it would work. What happens when a movement has no leader? Does radical inclusivity make it stronger or more chaotic? And if change must come from outside the system, how do you build something powerful enough not just to resist injustice, but to replace it? Coming up on the next five episodes of an unfinished uprising.
[36:51]
Marissa Holmes
Occupy Wall Street. It was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck.
[37:00]
Astra Taylor
The NYPD would pick people up on the street for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something.
[37:07]
Mila Atmos
They would drop them off in the
[37:09]
Astra Taylor
park and say, you need a hot
[37:10]
Mila Atmos
meal, you need a blanket, you need a coat. Go down to Zuccotti park.
[37:14]
Nalini Stamp
And the escalation of police activity was like, really, really wild.
[37:21]
Marissa Holmes
Out of nowhere, that's when we were sprayed.
[37:25]
Mila Atmos
Occupy. It was a physical space where people put their values into practice, and that's
[37:32]
Nalini Stamp
not something that we see very often.
[37:34]
Marissa Holmes
I wish something like it would happen again.
[37:47]
Mila Atmos
An unfinished uprising is a future hindsight. Production hosted and executive produced by me, Mila Atmos reporting, writing and producing by Maria Luisa Tucker. Additional production help from Mia Warren, Erica Gajda, Megan Dietrich and Lizzie Jacobs. Audio engineering and producing by Zach Travis. Archival research by Marissa Holmes. Archival material courtesy of Occupy Wall Street Media Working Group. Original music by Ruth Rude Mechanical Orchestra and Pood Rue. Special thanks to TJ Raphael, Lauren Passel, Ariel Nissenblatt and Kate Blumenfeld for being our first listeners and sounding boards, and to Tom Koenig for his support.

Summary6 min read

Optimist Economy Episode Title: Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising: The Invitation (Ep. 1)
Hosts: Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi
Date: August 11, 2026

Episode Overview

In this debut episode of the Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising miniseries, hosts Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi (through audio production and narration by Mila Atmos) revisit the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement—an event that powerfully shifted the American economic dialogue after the 2008 financial crash. Through first-person accounts and detailed storytelling, the episode explores how a spontaneous protest against Wall Street greed and economic injustice grew into a nationwide movement. The storytellers invite us to reflect on what Occupy got right, what it missed, and what lessons can be drawn for building a better and more inclusive economy today.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Economic Despair and the Spark of Occupy

Tenuous Life for "Regular People": The hosts outline everyday economic struggles—unaﬀordable childcare, medical bills, job insecurity—not as personal failures but as systemic issues (00:00–00:27).
Backdrop of the Financial Crash: The narrative quickly moves to the aftermath of the 2008 collapse—the bailouts for banks, lost homes and jobs, and a sense of betrayal among ordinary Americans (07:23–08:49).
- "Regular working people had to foot the bill for corporate greed." — Mila Atmos (04:54)
Momentum Builds in Crisis: Frustrations fester after the bailout, particularly among Millennials who enter adulthood saddled with debt and diminished prospects, analogous to Gen Z’s COVID-19 shock (08:49–09:09).
Key Quote:
"To put it another way, what COVID lockdowns were to Gen Z, the 2008 financial crash was to Millennials." — Mila Atmos (08:53)

2. Personal Stories: Voices of a Generation

Nalini Stamp: Shares how her family faced bankruptcy and eviction, forcing her out of high school and into low-wage work (09:10–10:15).
- "I was so embarrassed by that [not going to college]." — Nalini Stamp (10:02)
Sandy Nurse: Details her upbringing as a military child, disillusionment with U.S. humanitarian efforts, and eventual draw to local activism in New York (10:23–12:42).
- "We should not be asking these women to work for a sack of beans or small dollars to do public works projects..." — Sandy Nurse (11:44)
Marissa Holmes: Describes her Midwest upbringing, her politicization post-9/11, and her activism roots in the antiwar movement, culminating in planning for Occupy (13:02–14:39).

3. Birth of the Movement: From Meme to Reality

Adbusters’ Viral Image: The Occupy call-to-action is traced back to a viral email featuring a ballerina on Wall Street’s bull, circulating 90,000 times and fueling online excitement (17:50–19:52).
Anonymous Joins In: The hacktivist group amplifies the invitation, giving activists a clear date and rationale to take action (20:07–20:59).
Skepticism and Hope: Activist Astra Taylor expresses doubts, reflecting how little movement energy the American Left had compared to the Tea Party’s mobilization (17:07–21:04, 22:53).
- "Over half a million people across the country attended these tax day protests. People were angry... and it was channeled into this right-wing, reactionary, racist movement." — Astra Taylor (21:59)

4. September 17, 2011: The First Day in Zuccotti

Arrival: Activists find Wall Street barricaded, reroute to Zuccotti Park, and set up an initial “festival” atmosphere—yoga, face painting, drum circles (24:27–25:21).
- "I felt like I was in the movie Hair. It was very, like, hippie dippy." — Nalini Stamp (25:21)
Small Group Conversations and General Assembly: The day transitions from festival to focused discussions about economic injustice and collective action, using the “people’s mic” and leaderless facilitation (25:49–29:23).
- "What was so striking... was that instead of standing there and chanting... we were all told to sit in small circles... and we just started talking." — Astra Taylor (26:14)
Anonymity and Connection: Stories of debt, foreclosure, and shame create connection and shift perspectives from personal failure to collective struggle and rage (27:25–28:30).
- "It was just so different from anything [I’d] seen before." — Nalini Stamp (29:23)

5. Decision to Occupy: Will They Stay or Go?

Democratic Decision-Making: The group debates whether to stay in the park despite owner and police warnings (30:11–31:39).
- "Are we going to stay or not?" — Marissa Holmes (30:36)
Personal Choices: Some, like Sandy and Nalini, choose to stay out of solidarity and curiosity; others, like Astra, are skeptical and leave (31:43–32:52).
- "We don't have much on the line... Let's just hang out here with these folks who seem angry too." — Sandy Nurse (31:54)
- "I did not think this tiny ragtag group had a snowball's chance in hell of staying the night." — Astra Taylor (32:26)

6. Tension, Police, and the First Night

Police Presence: Tensions run high as the park is surrounded by police, but, unexpectedly, no eviction occurs (32:52–34:16).
First Night in the Park: Protesters make do—sharing blankets, looking after each other, feeling the beginning of something new (34:20–34:53).
- "We might not know what we're doing, but we'll figure shit out for each other." — Nalini Stamp (34:37)

7. Occupy's Legacy: Hope, Experimentation, and Unfinished Business

What Made Occupy Special: The episode closes with reflections on leaderlessness, radical inclusivity, and direct democracy—making Zuccotti Park a working experiment as much as a protest (34:53–36:50).
- Key Question: "What happens when a movement has no leader? Does radical inclusivity make it stronger or more chaotic?"
Looking Forward: The episode teases upcoming coverage of Occupy’s evolution: internal struggles, clashes with police, and the enduring desire for economic justice (36:50–37:34).
- "Occupy Wall Street. It was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck." — Marissa Holmes (36:50)
- "I wish something like it would happen again." — Marissa Holmes (37:34)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

"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."
— Marissa Holmes (28:42)
"This whole, like, hands thing, twinkle fingers. I was like, okay, this is gonna be wild."
— Nalini Stamp on the hand signals used during assemblies (29:23)
"Anger wasn't the thing that kept people coming back for 59 days to sleep on the concrete. There was some other magic happening that had something to do with the energizing force of collective action."
— Mila Atmos (34:53)

Key Timestamps

[00:37] Introduction of Zuccotti Park and the atmosphere before the raid
[04:35] Occupy’s message goes mainstream: the system is rigged
[09:10] Personal recession stories: Nalini’s eviction, Sandy’s disillusionment, Marissa’s activism
[17:50] Origin of the Occupy meme and online call
[24:27] Occupy’s first day—barricades, reroute to Zuccotti, yoga/drum circles
[25:49] Transition to deep discussion and formation of the General Assembly
[29:23] People's mic, twinkle fingers, and collective decision-making
[31:43] The decision to stay the night; personal testimonies
[32:52] Police stand-off ends without eviction, tension dissipates
[34:53] Closing reflections on Occupy as a social experiment and the movement's energy

Episode Tone & Takeaway

The episode is a mix of nostalgia, hard-won wisdom, and hope—grounded in personal detail and a "we-the-people" sensibility. Listeners are left with questions about how grassroots energy can be recaptured and channeled for deeper, systemic change, especially in today's challenging political climate. The stories underline the power of collective action, the healing of shared experience, and the imperfect but vital pursuit of economic justice.

Next time: How Occupy developed its unique culture—and how internal and external pressures shaped its fate.

Loading summary

Transcript143 lines

[00:01]
Marissa Holmes
If you can't afford childcare or can't afford to take a sick day, that's
[00:05]
Mila Atmos
not just your bad luck. It's actually bad for our economy.
[00:08]
Marissa Holmes
I'm Katherine Ann Edwards, an economist, and
[00:10]
Mila Atmos
I'm editor Robin Rousey.
[00:12]
Sandy Nurse
On our podcast Optimist Economy, I break down how our lives intersect with the
[00:16]
Mila Atmos
economy, whether it's wages, Social Security, the national debt. And I ask the questions that you're
[00:21]
Marissa Holmes
actually thinking, like, is AI going to take my job? Americans deserve a better economy than the one we have.
[00:27]
Sandy Nurse
So let's talk about how to get
[00:28]
Mila Atmos
there every Tuesday on Optimist Economy wherever
[00:31]
Marissa Holmes
you listen to podcast.
[00:37]
Mila Atmos
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. 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. All right, just say no.
[01:54]
Sandy Nurse
Right now.
[01:55]
Mila Atmos
We're being raided at Occupy Wall Street. Please start tweeting as many people as possible and letting folks know Occupy Wall street is being raided. As the cops surrounded them, the occupiers had a livestream going. They sent out a call for help to their network of supporters across the city.
[02:13]
Nathan Schneider
It was the middle of the night,
[02:14]
Mila Atmos
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. Hundreds of supporters began rushing to Zuccotti park as the occupiers tried to hold ground.
[02:32]
Astra Taylor
The cops are, like, right in front of us. A wall of cops in riot gear.
[02:37]
Marissa Holmes
They've got the, you know, the shields,
[02:39]
Mila Atmos
and they're fully weaponized.
[02:41]
Astra Taylor
And we look like a bunch of hippies.
[02:44]
Mila Atmos
There's people screaming everywhere. Like, literally, tents are being torn apart with knives.
[02:49]
Sandy Nurse
They're throwing people's stuff over their heads as they're going through tents, just throwing them out.
[02:53]
Marissa Holmes
All my shit's in there.
[02:54]
Sandy Nurse
All my friends are in there.
[02:57]
Marissa Holmes
That's my fucking home.
[03:00]
Mila Atmos
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 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.
[03:22]
Nalini Stamp
I was like, let me out. And I, like, 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.
[03:30]
Mila Atmos
Soon, 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. Get him back on the floor. Get him on the side.
[03:49]
Astra Taylor
You.
[03:51]
Mila Atmos
Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Zuccotti 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. What started as less than a dozen
[04:35]
Astra Taylor
college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock exchange is now hundreds of protesters.
[04:40]
Mila Atmos
The crowds swelled dramatically as labor unions and college students added their voices. Protests against Wall street continued to grow across the country. Occupy Wall street has become Occupy the world. Occupy Wall street came on the heels of a devastating economic crash that was caused by corpor 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 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 fail fascism from future hindsight, I'm your host Mila Atmos, and this is an unfinished uprising. Episode 1 the Invitation the Occupy movement starts with the story of a generation whose promise had been abruptly halted when the economy crashed in 2008.
[07:23]
Nathan Schneider
The housing market collapse created one financial
[07:26]
Mila Atmos
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.
[07:42]
Astra Taylor
But now it's official.
[07:43]
Mila Atmos
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 $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.
[09:11]
Nalini Stamp
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.
[09:21]
Mila Atmos
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.
[09:30]
Nalini Stamp
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?
[09:42]
Mila Atmos
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.
[10:02]
Nalini Stamp
I have a good enough degree 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.
[10:15]
Mila Atmos
Then there's Sandy Nurse. She was born in Panama to two Navy sailors, a white American mother and a black Panamanian father.
[10:24]
Sandy Nurse
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, almost my entire childhood, moving around the world and seeing the reactions to that, the consequences of that.
[10:48]
Mila Atmos
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 like a promising career in humanitarian aid.
[11:01]
Sandy Nurse
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.
[11:20]
Mila Atmos
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.
[11:44]
Sandy Nurse
The thing that really just kind of snapped for me 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 like a Backhoe or like a big claw caterpillar thing. These women are just moving these boulders. And I just said, this shit is. This is not for me. Like, 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 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 Americanism.
[12:36]
Mila Atmos
And so Sandy quit that whole endeavor, gave up on that career path to take a less ethically fraught job.
[12:42]
Sandy Nurse
My family was upset and didn't understand what I was doing. And they were like, you're like a bike. You're like a food delivery person now.
[12:50]
Mila Atmos
So summer of 2011, she was delivering food to residents of gentrified Brooklyn and, and trying to figure out her place in the world.
[12:58]
Sandy Nurse
And it just so happened at that moment Occupy came about.
[13:02]
Mila Atmos
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 like Sandy or Nalini. Maybe it's her Midwestern roots.
[13:19]
Marissa Holmes
I grew up in central Ohio in a small town that kind of became a suburb. And my parents had been involved in like Democratic party politics mostly. I mean, they definitely talked about politics like constantly.
[13:37]
Mila Atmos
Her dad was actually a labor lawyer for a time.
[13:40]
Marissa Holmes
I was in high school when 911 happened.
[13:46]
Mila Atmos
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.
[14:04]
Marissa Holmes
I learned about, you know, politics and how power works and how to organize first, you know, from my parents, and then became more radicalized in the context of the anti war movement.
[14:17]
Mila Atmos
From then on, she was a dedicated activist. By the summer of 2011, Marissa 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.
[14:39]
Marissa Holmes
It was a long, hot August in the summer of 2011, and we met under the Hare Krishna tree in Tompkins Square Park.
[14:48]
Mila Atmos
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
[15:13]
Marissa Holmes
of Thomas Square Park. There's a rather large tree, and with roots that kind of extend out into the concrete and break it up. And people go there to meditate and play music and just be together.
[15:29]
Mila Atmos
This huge elm tree was the site of the first Hare Ka 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.
[15:44]
Marissa Holmes
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, you know, operating on anarchist time, people are generally late.
[16:01]
Mila Atmos
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.
[17:07]
Astra Taylor
There was not a lot of social movement energy.
[17:11]
Mila Atmos
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.
[17:27]
Astra Taylor
It was an incredibly demoralizing experience to protest in the aughts. I mean, typically what would happen is the cops would kettle you, which means that they would sort of wrap your protests 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 kind of prankster, disruptive spirit on the Internet.
[17:51]
Mila Atmos
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 like 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 Occupy Wall Street. 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 are Anonymous. On September 17, 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 and a plurality of voices who 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 are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not perdia. We do not forget Wall Street. Expect us. The editors at Adbusters had made it clear that they only wanted to instigate, not organize. And certainly Anonymous wasn't used to IRL actions. For Marissa's group of anarchists, the New York City General assembly, it was like they'd been given a save the date for a party they'd been thinking about throwing but hadn't fully committed to yet. But now that someone else had announced an actual time and place, they decided to go with it. They created a plan for the first day and hoped that people would show up. And really, that was the big question. Would online enthusiasm translate into the real world? Would people actually show up? Astra was skeptical.
[21:05]
Astra Taylor
It was a pretty bleak time to be a leftist, despite the fact that we were in an economic Meltdown. There was mass foreclosures, there was mass joblessness, economic insecurity. The left wasn't mobilizing, but the right was.
[21:22]
Mila Atmos
From Washington, D.C. to Connecticut to Wisconsin
[21:25]
Nathan Schneider
and all over the country, thousands of
[21:28]
Mila Atmos
people came out to protest government spending.
[21:34]
Astra Taylor
The Tea Party got off the ground in 2009.
[21:38]
Mila Atmos
The Tea Party movement was a right wing populist uprising. They protested both the bank bailouts and government efforts to help distressed homeowners and unemployed people, which they viewed as government handouts to undeserving poor people. And so they showed up en masse on tax day to protest government spending.
[21:59]
Astra Taylor
Over half a million people across the country attended these tax day protests. People were angry about the bank bailouts, they were angry about the economy. They were feeling insecure. And it was channeled into this right wing, reactionary, racist movement. It was like, how can we be in a situation akin to the Great Depression and the populist right is mobilizing and progressives and the left are nowhere to be found?
[22:21]
Mila Atmos
But now there was a call to respond from the left that seemed to have some traction. It was late, three years after the economic crash, but at least there was something. And it promised to be noisy and disruptive and maybe a little nuts. A call to camp out on Wall street for as long as they could as a way to bring attention to how unfair it was that regular people had borne the brunt of a financial crash brought on by Wall street greed. It was something that, well, Astra didn't help plan and didn't think was gonna work.
[22:54]
Astra Taylor
But the fact that there was crickets on our side after this incre. Incredible betrayal of the country by these bankers and by the politicians of both parties who are bailing them out and leaving people to suffer, it just felt like, well, we have to do something. And that was enough of a motivation to get me to show up at something that I wasn't particularly optimistic about.
[23:18]
Mila Atmos
Perhaps it was only because Occupy was kind of the only game in town. But our cynics, Sandy and Aline, that I introduced to you earlier, were curious.
[23:27]
Sandy Nurse
I had been following online a little bit, and one of my best friends, both of us, were kind of these gloom and doom, disillusioned, apathetic, hate political culture. We had that kind of a summer. We were just kind of reveling in the futileness of everything. And so we were kind of following along and we just decided, oh, we're gonna go down there on the first day. Let's just check it out.
[23:50]
Nalini Stamp
I was approached by a lot of White people about Occupy Wall street, like, in the months before. And I was like, why would I choose to sleep outside?
[23:58]
Sandy Nurse
What?
[23:59]
Nalini Stamp
Like, what is this white shit? To be honest, that was my like. I was like, what is this sleeping outside? Like, by choice? I thought it was insane.
[24:13]
Mila Atmos
The day to occupy arrived. September 17, 2011, a Saturday. Marissa and a bunch of the other hardcore activists were ready to set up camp outside the New York Stock Exchange.
[24:28]
Marissa Holmes
I Woke up around 8 o' clock and packed my backpack, which was quite large. I'm like five, two, and it was probably like, 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.
[24:51]
Mila Atmos
Since they couldn't actually get to the stock exchange. Marissa 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.
[25:21]
Nalini Stamp
I felt like I was in the movie Hair. It was very, like, hippie dippy. I was political to the point of doing stuff, but I never was like, I'm an anarchist or a socialist. Like, I just care that the rich have too much money. I knew it in my bones that, like, rich people, corporations, like, they're crazy, and I was an injustice. But I just looked around and was like, yeah, I'm gonna be here for, like, an hour.
[25:42]
Mila Atmos
Eventually, the festival part of it all that Nalini really wasn't feeling transitioned into something deeper and more personal.
[25:49]
Marissa Holmes
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 like, what world do you want to 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 want to live in?
[26:10]
Mila Atmos
Astra arrived in time for the small group conversations.
[26:15]
Astra Taylor
What was so striking to me and caught my imagination out the gate was that instead of standing there and chanting, which would have been a kind of conventional thing to do, I mean, 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 with, like, such a break with the usual script, because instead of standing sort of outside the New York Stock Exchange and saying, you know, you suck, and shouting at it. We were actually building bonds with each other.
[26:57]
Marissa Holmes
People had all kinds of stories. Like, they had hitchhiked across the country and had nothing. Like, had no job, no money, just, you know, used whatever they could to get to the occupation. And there was this, like, palpable sense of rage, like this simmering rage that people wanted to unleash. People had been waiting for years to say something, and they finally could say it.
[27:26]
Mila Atmos
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 like hers from other people.
[27:45]
Nalini Stamp
What shifted for me was that general assembly that first night and people getting up and telling their stories.
[27:52]
Mila Atmos
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.
[28:10]
Nalini Stamp
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, like, we were all told we had to go to college to get a better job. And somebody was like, and I'm working at Starbucks. Not that it's like, you know, solidarity with the Starbucks workers union, but, like, that wasn't what we were told you go to college for, right?
[28:30]
Mila Atmos
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 sort of confession, there was this.
[28:42]
Marissa Holmes
This sense of hope. We know how bad it is, and we just need to come together and build this space, and, like, 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.
[29:01]
Mila Atmos
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. They 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.
[29:23]
Nalini Stamp
This whole, like, hands thing, twinkle fingers. I was like, okay, this is gonna be wild.
[29:28]
Mila Atmos
But she was, in spite of herself, inspired. She stood up to speak at one
[29:33]
Nalini Stamp
point, I remember getting up. I don't remember what I said. I think I was like, 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 like, whatever's happening, I like it, and I'm gonna do what needs to be done.
[29:50]
Mila Atmos
That moment of cynicism turning to optimism was happening for other people at the park too, including Sandy, who had arrived with friends.
[29:59]
Sandy Nurse
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.
[30:11]
Mila Atmos
Of course, the powers that be wanted them out of the park in the spirit of direct democracy. Their decision to stay or go was up to the group and as a whole. So Marissa took a bullhorn to make an announcement.
[30:24]
Marissa Holmes
A really amazing process, direct democracy. But we recognize that this is a specific group, a gathering that we have here. And we want to hear from people here to see how we can proceed tonight. So one of our first orders of business is, are we going to stay or not?
[30:43]
Mila Atmos
She passed the bullhorn to someone else from the facilitation team. I'm here with some logistical information. This square.
[30:51]
Nathan Schneider
This square is technically a privately owned square.
[31:01]
Mila Atmos
We have been in contact with the property owner who has told us that
[31:06]
Nathan Schneider
his intention is to not allow people to sleep in this park tonight.
[31:12]
Mila Atmos
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.
[31:25]
Marissa Holmes
Facilitation team
[31:29]
Mila Atmos
sensing dissenting. That people want.
[31:32]
Sandy Nurse
That people want.
[31:33]
Mila Atmos
Stay here. Stay here and occupy this square. And occupy this square.
[31:39]
Sandy Nurse
How do you feel about that?
[31:44]
Mila Atmos
This was a moment for each individual, Sandy, Astra, Nalini, and everyone else to decide would they stay or would they go? Sandy.
[31:55]
Sandy Nurse
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. I mean, 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.
[32:17]
Mila Atmos
Meanwhile, somewhere else in the park, Nalini was making the same decision.
[32:21]
Nalini Stamp
Me and my friends, we were like, you're gonna sleep here? We're like, yeah.
[32:24]
Mila Atmos
Astra made a different choice.
[32:26]
Astra Taylor
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 going to go, okay, kids, you've had enough. Like, you know, we're going to beat the shit out of you. That's what I thought was about to happen, and I didn't want to be there for that.
[32:53]
Mila Atmos
Marissa was anxiously watching the police in riot gear.
[32:57]
Marissa Holmes
I was terrified because I didn't feel like we had prepared enough. I really. I felt this sense of responsibility. So I was both excited and terrified of what would come next.
[33:10]
Mila Atmos
Nathan Schneider, a journalist who had been covering activism in the city, was there.
[33:15]
Nathan Schneider
There had been a few thousand people there that day, but by this point, it was dark. New York has this kind of eerie feeling in these sections of the city where not a lot of people are out at night. It's in these corridors of office buildings. And so by this point, there were just 100, maybe 200 at most, if that, protesters sitting in this park surrounded by police. It was a very scary moment in the dark.
[33:43]
Mila Atmos
In that moment of tension, he witnessed some kind of exchange between what seemed like the property owners and the nypd.
[33:51]
Nathan Schneider
I saw a Suburban roll up a police vehicle. You know, someone was talking to the officers who were there. I think I saw Police Commissioner Kelly. Something that was said in that exchange, in that moment said, okay, this is not going to be an attack. The police surrounding this park had made the decision to let it be. And after that, the tension kind of reduced.
[34:17]
Mila Atmos
People started to fall asleep. Here's Nalini again.
[34:20]
Nalini Stamp
I just got too tired, and we all, like, fell asleep on the ground. It got cold. I didn't bring anything.
[34:25]
Mila Atmos
And Sandy, one of my friends, drove
[34:28]
Sandy Nurse
to Yonkers to get us blankets. I don't know why he went that far, but he's like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna make sure you all have blankets. And went up to Yonkers and came back with all these blankets.
[34:37]
Nalini Stamp
And then in the middle of the night, a fairy comes, I swear to God, just drops blankets over us. And that was the moment when I was like, okay, yeah, we might not know what we're doing, but we'll figure shit out for each other.
[34:53]
Mila Atmos
Occupy is a story of the improbable becoming possible. A story of hopelessness and cynicism making way for inspiration and collective action. It was clear from that very first day that Occupy had tapped into something that Nalini, Sandy, Marissa, and thousands of others had all been feeling. They were understandably Furious with the Wall street bankers who crashed the economy. And they felt betrayed by the political leaders who enabled, and some would say rewarded it. But Occupy was a lot more than an opportunity to rage at the system. Anger wasn't the thing that kept people coming back for 59 days to sleep on the concrete. There was some other magic happening that had something to do with the energizing force of collective action. It's that the energy, the inspiration that's most interesting to me. Is there a way to harness that Again, Occupy was also a social experiment. They weren't just there to protest. They were trying to create an anarchist, anti capitalist utopia inside that tiny park. And against all odds, people across the United States set up their own occupations and copied what the radicals in New York City were doing. In this way, Zuccotti park became a testing ground for a set of ideals that the organizers had arrived. Leaderlessness, radical inclusivity, direct democracy. At the beginning, it wasn't at all clear if any of it would work. What happens when a movement has no leader? Does radical inclusivity make it stronger or more chaotic? And if change must come from outside the system, how do you build something powerful enough not just to resist injustice, but to replace it? Coming up on the next five episodes of an unfinished uprising.
[36:51]
Marissa Holmes
Occupy Wall Street. It was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck.
[37:00]
Astra Taylor
The NYPD would pick people up on the street for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something.
[37:07]
Mila Atmos
They would drop them off in the
[37:09]
Astra Taylor
park and say, you need a hot
[37:10]
Mila Atmos
meal, you need a blanket, you need a coat. Go down to Zuccotti park.
[37:14]
Nalini Stamp
And the escalation of police activity was like, really, really wild.
[37:21]
Marissa Holmes
Out of nowhere, that's when we were sprayed.
[37:25]
Mila Atmos
Occupy. It was a physical space where people put their values into practice, and that's
[37:32]
Nalini Stamp
not something that we see very often.
[37:34]
Marissa Holmes
I wish something like it would happen again.
[37:47]
Mila Atmos
An unfinished uprising is a future hindsight. Production hosted and executive produced by me, Mila Atmos reporting, writing and producing by Maria Luisa Tucker. Additional production help from Mia Warren, Erica Gajda, Megan Dietrich and Lizzie Jacobs. Audio engineering and producing by Zach Travis. Archival research by Marissa Holmes. Archival material courtesy of Occupy Wall Street Media Working Group. Original music by Ruth Rude Mechanical Orchestra and Pood Rue. Special thanks to TJ Raphael, Lauren Passel, Ariel Nissenblatt and Kate Blumenfeld for being our first listeners and sounding boards, and to Tom Koenig for his support.