Santa Fe is one of approximately 1,300 cities worldwide hosting protests in support of Occupy Wall Street.
Santa Fe is the latest in a long line of cities to host Occupy Wall Street protests. Saturday, Oct. 8, marked the second weekend in a row of protests in front of a local Bank of America branch.
On Oct. 15, protesters will move to the Roundhouse as part of worldwide marches inspired by Occupy Wall Street, which has been underway for a month now.
Darryl Wellington, a journalist who joined the Santa Fe protests, says the current movement isn’t spontaneous, but rather a “continuation of an attitude that’s been around for quite some time,” below the radar.
“There have been so many left-wing protests that haven’t gotten [media attention],” Wellington tells SFR. “It is absurd.”
But Occupy Wall Street has elicited a bigger media reaction—which, in turn, has spurred its regional growth.
“To occur across the country, you’ve got to be in the news in the first place,” Wellington says. “It’s cyclical.”
The protests, which began on Wall Street on Sept. 17, aren’t showing any signs of dying down. As of press time, more than 1,300 cities across the globe have held or are planning Occupy-related rallies. Protesters in Santa Fe said their numbers doubled, from 75 to around 150, between the first two protests.
If a single grievance could exemplify their outrage, it’s that the country’s richest 1 percent is profiting at the expense of everyone else.
Craig Barnes, an organizer with the local advocacy group We Are People Here!, says US democracy has been “taken over by an ideology of selfishness and greed.”
“Wall Street represents that,” he tells SFR.
The most recent data on income inequality, from a 2008 University of California study, found that the richest
1 percent of the US controlled almost 21 percent of the country’s wealth. Before the 2000s, income inequality hadn’t been that high since 1929.
But protestors’ feelings trump the numbers, Kate Krause, a labor economist at the University of New Mexico, tells SFR.
“These people did not just go out and read census data,” Krause says. “There’s the sense and perception that the fat cats got away with something.”
Jason Scott Smith, a UNM historian and author of the Great Depression history book Building New Deal Liberalism, sees some similarities between that era and today.
In the 1930s, protests from the left included farmers who kept their crops from the marketplace to avoid low prices. At the same time, people from the center and right held rallies against property taxes and rental rates, Smith says.
Today, left-wing protesters and tea partiers lament the economic downturn with equal furor.
But while a segment of the public may harbor animosity toward multinational corporations, Smith says some make exceptions. He cites the recent death of Steve Jobs as an example.
“It seems like plenty of people are feeling sympathy toward this corporate titan,” Smith says. “How much taxes does Apple pay to the government? These are questions certain people ask about some corporations and not others.”
Despite calls against a partisan co-opt of the Occupy movement —including one from former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat—the Democratic Party is already urging its supporters to side with the protests in a planned letter to Republican congressional leaders, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org has publicly supported next week’s protest at the Roundhouse.
Smith says it’s too early to say whether this strategy will pay off, stating that most Americans historically didn’t have favorable views of protest movements.
“If Obama were to grab a bullhorn and join the protests, that may be a bad move with the public,” he says.
The movement’s political success will depend on how well it can organize and develop a strategic message, Christine Sierra, a UNM political science professor, tells SFR. She adds that it lacks an infrastructure—but to many, its leaderless character is the point.
Wellington mentions how the tea party didn’t originally have a clear agenda, but eventually gained enough steam to steer policymakers in its direction.
“Maybe we don’t have the type of power that the tea party backers have, but that’s why we need numbers,” he says. “With enough people protesting, maybe we can get some answers.”
At SFReporter.com, we’re posting frequent updates on the Occupy Santa Fe movement—photo, videos, even some maps to send you to the right protest location. On Twitter, follow #OccupySantaFe or visit the movement’s Facebook page, facebook.com/occupysantafe.
I stand in solidarity with the world’s population in peacefully trying to return to the people what rightfully belongs to them. However, if this movement fails to focus on the main problem/issue, which is the [International Monetary Fund]/[Federal Reserve] controlling the people’s money, nothing of any consequence or value will be accomplished by these “occupation” movements.
Unless the private cartel of international bankers, aka Federal Reserve Bank in the US, is forced to give back to the people the power to coin/print REAL money, nothing will change.
Our current financial crisis has been planned for years. “Give me control over a nation’s currency and I care not who makes its laws.” said Baron MA Rothschild, in the late 1800’s.
Both political parties have contributed equally to the current world financial fiasco, and both get paid handsomely for doing so. If this were not so, Alan Greenspan would never have declared “there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we (the Federal Reserve Bank) take.”
The Federal Reserve Act must be repealed, and it will be if the Fed is ever audited. Only then will we find out where trillions of our “bailout” dollars went.
I support Bob Carman’s view that the Federal Reserve should be completely audited and probably dissolved, in a return to real money and balanced government budgets. Congress (including our senators, [Tom] Udall and [Jeff] Bingaman) does not support any such action, of course. The Federal Reserve is the primary vehicle in expanding their power through dishonest spending.
Adam Smith explained, in the capitalist’s bible, Wealth of Nations, how government’s main role lay in defending the populace from the unfair power of oligopolies. By that standard, big business co-opted our government well over a century ago (and has discredited capitalism, especially in creating a protected monopoly on money issuance; its very center). However, it is not accurate to claim that our current financial crisis was “planned.” More often, things go wrong from ineptitude than by intention.
We are all greedy because we contain unlimited desires. However, over the last 40 years, inept and corrupt governments systematically dismantled critical restraints against institutional greed, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s fiddling the price of money.
Naturally, the two sectors that benefited most from the resulting explosion in credit were its two main constituents: government and financial companies—government because they could now borrow with impunity, and banks because the credit vendors primarily enriched themselves. (And this accounts for the wage/productivity gap, where economic productivity soared but wages went nowhere—these two, increasingly parasitical, sectors absorbing most of the growth).
I know and respect Barry Hatfield, and I appreciate his thoughtful letters to the editor. However, his suggestion that the financial crisis was simply the result of ineptitude and greed carries with it four primary myths.
Those are the myths of 1. collective responsibility for the rises and falls of the economy or “business cycles,” 2. lack of a motive for deliberately crashing the economy, 3. the unforeseeability of the crisis and 4. that there is no opponent. All four are provably false.
It is not enough to understand that the [Federal Reserve] is a privately owned, for-profit enterprise. One needs to understand the history of banking and finance, best conveyed in the documentary The Money Masters. The best book on the present financial crisis is titled Crisis by Design, by John Truman Wolfe.
Wolfe clearly establishes that the financial crisis was primarily engineered by the Bank [for] International Settlements (the central bank to all central banks) to increase national central banks’ proportion of control despite taking a loss on the books; to further destroy national economies and increase debt; and as a pretext for more centralized control, to establish a bank of the world. The latter has long been a stated objective of top financial players.
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement is starting to look like the beginnings of the [overthrow] of the Egyptian government. Why not? Get a big enough mob and occupy our government buildings. Right? Apparently, you can’t use force to keep control of your nation, otherwise the liberal media, [President Barack] Obama and [Secretary of State] Hillary [Clinton] will get upset. When I hear these protesters talk about the connection between Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve and their tentacles in every administration, I’ll start to take them seriously. At this point, they just want [to] force others to surrender their assets.