EDITOR’S NOTE: The movement now has a professionally produced newspaper worthy of readers who are hungry for the real news. The name, probably temporary, is the Occupy Wall Street Journal. In addition to live streaming video, daily newsworthy events as politicians try to tap into the energy of the movement before they get swallowed by it, they now have a bona fide newspaper.
But there is another story here that is interesting. News travels around the OWLS by story-telling. There is no public address system and the numbers are swelling beyond the point where even the loudest speakers could reach — especially when you consider the fact that Occupy Wall Street has spawned the same action in many major cities across the country — just as it has happened in Europe and the Middle East. Things are changing. But the communication is personal – one on one. When someone makes a speech in one part it is repeated by someone down the line for others to hear and so it goes in a personal voice chain until the last person in the most outer reaches of the crowd gets to hear what was said.
This is personal and it is important. And the protesters are not just homeowners trying to hang onto their homes. It is mostly people who have been angry as hell since the bailout because we never got any straight answers about why it was really necessary. The real reason, it turns out, is that the banks stole the money and wouldn’t give it back. But the government, taking its information from the banks (go to the maker of the crime, after all, they know the most and they wouldn’t lie would they?) was stirred into panic all too easily.
It wasn’t real panic. It was an excuse to give the banks and big business one more shot at the public trough, where taxpayers have had their hard-earned money sucked out of them, only to see it redistributed into the pockets of people who were already too rich by any standards and who were paying next to nothing in taxes. While one could conceivably offer some slack to Obama and his administration as not being economists and not having all the information they needed at the time, and maybe you could even make a similar argument for the Bush administration that initiated the bailout, it is different now. Everybody knows.
It is the current reality that protesters want addressed in addition to holding those who produced this mess accountable for every penny they received. This includes but is far from limited to the the money that was paid on account of “obligations” created when feckless homeowners signed mortgage papers that were in reality part of a larger scheme to issue bogus securities — mortgage bonds backed by nothing.
In a clever irony Wall Street ,managed to pull off this feat by not revealing to borrowers that their signature was part of a larger scheme in which Wall Street was making a LOT of money that was undisclosed, contrary to the requirements of existing law. Now, in foreclosure, they are successful at limiting the court’s inquiry to small piece of the total securitization scheme that includes only the part where the borrower signed mortgage papers.
This is why the burden has shifted unfairly to borrowers to explain the unexplainable to Judges. This is why borrowers need to got through the time and expense of mastering securitization and contract law, property law, and predatory and deceptive lending; and it is why they need the kind of title analysis and securitization analysis and forensic analysis offered through this blog and by hundreds of other services.
The COMBO is not fairly something that the borrower should be required to produce. In due process, it is up to the the party seeking affirmative relief (like a foreclosure sale) to allege the elements of a bona fide cause of action and then prove it. The only reason why millions of homes have been “foreclosed) most vulnerable to being set aside if the homeowner is so inclined) is that the Courts listened to the bankers instead of the real news and failed to follow the law of evidence, and the laws of civil procedure where the burden of proof is and should be squarely on the banker that seeks to own someone else’s home.
Right now it is still up to the borrowers to shoulder the burden of proof of an elaborate scheme they had no part in creating and no basis for understanding. The whole paradigm shifts when Banks are forced to plead and actually prove their case with competent evidence — the whole case, that is, including the money they received from investors and the money they received when they bet against the bonds and mortgages. And when the Banks are forced on a larger scale to account for the entire scheme, the taxpayers, homeowners and job-seekers and the rest of the people who depend upon them will get the relief they deserve. Everyone is entitled to know the truth about where the money is, where it came from and how it was allocated.
People are angry because they know they are broke and they know who did it to them. Median income has dropped more since the recession was declared “over” than it dropped during the recession. Any person on the street knows what the government is just now grudgingly admitting — we have an emergency on our hands, the recession was never “over” and the prospects for recovery are nonexistent unless and until we start telling the truth to each other and dealing with reality.
I can tell you when this crisis will be over. It will be done when we stop treating victims as perpetrators and stop treating perpetrators as “businessmen” who are merely successful at pursuing the American dream. If the American dream was alive we wouldn’t have the disparity of 1% of the country controlling virtually all the wealth, directly or indirectly while the other 99% are forced to stand idle, not working, even though they are trained or willing to be trained for the new jobs of the 21st century. It will be over when we stop calling theft “profits” and when we stop calling those who call for return of ill-gotten gains “redistribution of wealth” or “socialism.”
When a purse snatcher has the purse seized by law enforcement and returned to its rightful owner that is not redistribution of wealth. The purse wasn’t his to begin with. There was no wealth to distribute, just value returned to its owner.
At the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Zuccotti Park, you’ll find all of the essentials of a state-of-the-art protest: drum circles, cheeky and plaintive handwritten signs, and, next to a thrumming generator, a hub of social media activity, including live streaming of the proceedings.
But amid the accouterments of modern political action, you will also find, of all things, a broadsheet newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal. It is not some tatty, hand-drawn piece of protest samizdat, but a professionally produced, four-color, four-page document of the demonstration, which began on Sept. 17.
“Get your newspaper, get your free Occupied Wall Street Journal!” shouted one barker. Getting something in the hands of your average New Yorker is a pretty tough sell, but The Occupied Wall Street Journal was eagerly received, even by the people who just came to gawk, in part because it answered the question of what all the hubbub was about.
Forgive an old newspaper hack a moment of sentimentality, but it is somehow reassuring that a newspaper still has traction in an environment preoccupied by social media. It makes sense when you think about it: newspapers convey a sense of place, of actually being there, that digital media can’t. When is the last time somebody handed you a Web site?
“The act of one person giving another person a newspaper is important,” said Arun Gupta, one of dozens of people who helped put together The Occupied Wall Street Journal. “We wanted to come up with something that was beautifully designed and well-written that gives a tangible form to what is under way.” A call for the financing of the pop-up, instant newspaper went out on Kickstarter.com at the end of last month. An ad hoc group set out to raise $12,000 and has now surpassed $75,000. The initial print run of 50,000 was augmented with an extra 20,000 copies as the money rolled in, with promotional assists from Michael Moore, Andy Bichlbaum of the performance artists the Yes Men, and others. Mr. Gupta edited the newspaper, along with Michael Levitin, a former Associated Press journalist, and Jed Brandt, a writer and activist, was the lead designer. Dozens of other people pitched in. A second issue hit the streets on Saturday, along with a Spanish edition of the first issue.
Mr. Gupta is a longtime newspaperman, having published The Indypendent, a free, left-leaning newspaper that circulates to 20,000 readers in print and online, primarily in New York, 16 times a year.
The Occupied Wall Street Journal is not the “official” newspaper of the protest because nothing is official in the world of Occupy Wall Street. Mr. Gupta said that consensus was the core principle governing the protest, but something more entrepreneurial was required to get an actual newspaper out.
Although the sentiment and some of the informational anarchy of the event is reflected in the newspaper, it is produced by experienced, if far from objective, journalists. (You can get a PDF of the newspaper at bit.ly/qi05ls.) “We didn’t think there would be much in the way of coverage of the event, so we thought it was important that there be a media outlet that reflected what was under way,” Mr. Gupta said. “A newspaper is tactile, engages all of the senses, and leads to more immersive reading than what people might do online.”
While some of the recipients of the paper clearly saw it as little more than a souvenir, an artifact that demonstrates that they were present, many others opened up the paper and were reading it when I visited on Thursday.
Katie Trainer, who came from Lebanon, Pa., asked for a newspaper and suddenly found herself drafted to circulate some copies.
“This provides people information about a historic event,” she said. “It is a professional document, not just a sign.”
Christopher Guerra, working an informational table at the protest, is a fan of the newspaper, and newspapers in general.
“A Web site will come and go, but this could be here 100 years from now if the mold doesn’t get to it,” he said, holding a copy. “People say that newspapers are dying, but there is something about its physical properties, the fact that when you hold it in your hands, you end up with ink on them, that serves as a reminder that this all is real.”
Handsome as it is, no one is going to mistake The Occupied Wall Street Journal for its namesake — “the name just seemed like a natural,” Mr. Gupta said. (A spokeswoman at The Wall Street Journal declined to comment on the appropriation of the newspaper’s name.)
In the lead piece, Mr. Gupta writes, “For over two weeks, in the great cathedral of capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.” Not the kind of sentence you will see Peggy Noonan writing anytime soon, though Mr. Gupta said an artist who had done a stipple drawing for the real Wall Street Journal, had also contributed an illustration for the back page.
But the newspaper is not just a broadsheet version of “Anarchist Basics” either. There is a well-designed timeline of recent protests dating to the Arab Spring and continuing through the demonstrations in Wisconsin and protests in Europe. The first issue also included a charming photo essay on protest signs and the people who carry them, along with a call to action from Chris Hedges, a former reporter for The New York Times.
The writing can be flowery and the rhetoric a bit crunchy, but a piece titled “Occupations for Dummies” offered a carefully constructed document about how the protest came together (the group AdBusters put out the word in July); the limits and power of a leaderless movement (“really hard, frustrating and slow”); and the lack of a central demand.
Print and protest are frequent fellow travelers. It’s worth pointing out that at the beginning of the Arab Spring, the protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo also produced a newspaper called Liberation Square.
Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, said that newspapers would continue to play a durable role in social movements.
“In a newspaper is an element of analysis that you don’t get in a sign or a pamphlet,” he said. “In both the ’20s and ’30s, and during the protests of the ’60s, underground newspapers played an important role in bringing people together to create something in common.”
The rest of us in the media have had trouble catching up with Occupy Wall Street, in part because it refuses to live in a pigeon hole. Like all nascent social movements involving myriad interest groups, there are inchoate, atavistic impulses at work. So, are they the anti-Tea Party, the old guard lefties in new clothing, or just disenfranchised Americans engaging in some new form of pushback?
Rather than a neat list of demands, the group tends to ask questions. Then again, who among us has not wondered if the capitalistic fundamentals of choices and consequences were suspended in order to bail out Wall Street banking firms?
The country is just coming to grips with an episode in which some financial institutions, through fecklessness and greed, all but tipped over the American economy, and the arrival of the occupiers in the financial district presents a complicated subject.
Media coverage has tended to focus on civil disobedience because that is where the action is. Much was made of the thrust and parry between the protesters and police, most recently on Wednesday night, in which an attempt by some protesters to march down Wall Street was met with pepper spray and 23 arrests.
That melee was at distant remove by Thursday in Zuccotti Park. There were people taking naps, and occasional chants sprung up, while some of the police officers and protesters talked along the periphery. One of the cops took a proffered copy of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.
“What’s the harm?” he said. He opened the broadsheet to its full dimensions, and added: “I’ll give them one thing. It’s a pretty good-looking paper.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n
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