As Occupy Wall Street Grows, Scope of Grievances is Great

Katrina Brees paraded around Wall Street Tuesday in a white marching band costume and white furry boots, pulling a tricycle transformed into a sculpture of a pink unicorn. She drove all the way from New Orleans to help with the Occupy Wall Street protests, “to lift spirits and lend support,” she said, resting her hand on the unicorn’s head.

An artist and dance troupe leader driving 1,300 miles to protest what she sees as corporate greed is quite a display of populist anger. So what does Brees think about Bank of America’s recent announcement to charge customers $5 a month to make debit card purchases, which has generated similar feelings of outrage across the country?

[Related Article: Many Consumers Outraged by Bank of America’s Big New Debit Fee]

She hadn’t heard about it.

“Why should I care?” Brees said.

Others say the fee is a topic of discussion, but it hasn’t exactly become a major rallying cry among protesters.

“I talk to people about it 60 or 70 times a day,” says Daniel Levine, 22, a protester who was manning an information desk. “But I don’t know if anybody’s doing anything about it.”

It would seem a happy happenstance. Just as a group of protesters is beginning to gain international media attention to its anti-corporate agenda by occupying a park in the middle of the Wall Street financial district, Bank of America announced it would begin charging people a fee to use their own money.

Comments on Credit.com and other financial news websites were almost uniformly negative, with many people saying they would close their Bank of America accounts immediately. Even President Obama criticized the move, saying it may merit action by federal regulators.

This is precisely the kind of moment for which most nascent activist organizations pray. For at least a few brief days, the roving eye of the 24-hour news cycle is fixed on the same issue bringing the protesters together: Populist anger at Wall Street.

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But because Occupy Wall Street is such a diverse gathering, with a purposefully decentralized structure and no official spokesperson, it could be argued that the protesters are doing something that one rarely sees in our media savvy era: They’re letting a big news event slip right by.

“I haven’t heard anybody talking about it,” said Sara, 25, a volunteer at Occupy Wall Street who declined to give her last name. “Maybe you should go talk to the community outreach committee or the direct action committee. Maybe they’re working on it.”

We couldn’t find the direct action committee’s table, which supposedly is located somewhere in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, tucked in amongst the media table, the protesters sleeping under plastic tarps on blow-up mattresses, the drop-off station for donated food, the drumming circle, the phalanx of New York City police officers, and the hundreds of people generally milling around the park on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon.

We did find the outreach committee’s area, where a volunteer named Brian Harris was busy stretching a grey tarp over the table while carrying on conversations with five different people at once.

“No, we haven’t been talking about it,” Harris said. “My sole focus is getting ready for a march tomorrow.”

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As Occupy Wall Street Grows, Scope of Grievances is Great »

All images by Jamie Pietras

Lots of news outlets, from Fox News to The New York Times, have blasted the protesters at Occupy Wall Street for being disorganized, and for not knowing enough about the financial industry or corporate America to persuasively critique them. To some, the movement’s failure to capitalize on Bank of America’s debit fee might count as evidence that such a leaderless, amorphous group is unprepared to make a legitimate case for reform.

“The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face,” Ginia Bellafonte, a city columnist for The New York Times, wrote last week.

Of course, the protesters of Occupy Wall Street don’t see it that way. What may look to outsiders to be unregulated anarchy is actually a form of participatory democracy, volunteers at Zuccotti Park said Tuesday. A member of the movement published a proposed list of wide-ranging demands this week. But contrary to reports by Fox News and others that the list represents the unified voice of the protesters, a statement on Occupy Wall Street’s website makes clear that the list is not definitive because it was never “proposed or agreed to on a consensus basis.”

“It’s a completely incoherent laundry list,” says Levine.

[Related Article: California Protestors Rally Against Banks Over Housing Crisis]

Instead of a small committee of people making decisions that could alienate and drive away many in the crowd, some protesters say that despite the laundry list, they ultimately want to welcome as many people as possible into the collective who share the belief that corporations and the wealthiest 1% of Americans hold too much economic and political power. For many, that is the unifying principle.

“It’s a big tent, and that’s on purpose,” says David Intrator, 55, who owns a documentary film company and was walking around the park holding a small sign that read “Harvard Men for Economic Justice.” Intrator, whose film work has included projects by major corporations and banks, graduated Harvard class of ’78.

“I would even welcome the Tea Party to come here,” Intrator says. “Even though I think they’re wrong about the possible solutions, I think they’re concerned about the same things we are, that this country is off course.”

Besides, the week’s biggest financial news story did not entirely pass the protesters by. Josh Benash, a 29-year-old music teacher in White Plains, NY who was at the protest, told us he closed his Bank of America checking account last Friday because of the new debit fee. His cash is sitting in a fireproof safe until he opens a new account at a smaller bank or credit union.

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“I’m not going to pay to use my own money. That’s absurd,” says Benash.

But even though Bank of America’s decision angered him, Benash doubts whether the announcement will gain much traction among his fellow protesters.

“The scope of the grievances is so great,” says Benash, who was wearing a “Ban Fracking Now” sticker on the lapel of his coat as he passed out fliers for a labor march.

The process airing grievances in a decentralized environment is messy, and in this case, it has arguably left the movement slow-footed when it comes to capitalizing on big financial news. That said, many of the protesters with whom we spoke seem content with the tradeoff.

“People are confused about what is the intention of this movement,” says Giovanni Almonte, 33, a life coach in Weehawken, NJ who was volunteering at the protest. “But there is also this underlying tension that people want to see a change for the better. They just don’t know what that means yet.”

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All images by Jamie Pietras