Sindicalistas manifestam-se em apoio ao Ocupar Wall Street
Manifestação reuniu 20 mil trabalhadores e estudantes, e terminou no parque onde está instalada a acampada. “Ocupar Wall Street captura o espírito do nosso tempo”, diz sindicalista. Para Paul Krugman, “este pode ser o início de alguma coisa ao mesmo tempo grande e boa”.
ARTIGO | 6 OUTUBRO, 2011 - 15:22
“Este é o tipo de movimento necessário à América de hoje., diz o sindicalista Mike Hellstrom. Foto de manbartlett
Cerca de 20 mil pessoas, de acordo com os organizadores, manifestaram-se quarta feira nas ruas de Nova York contra a ganância empresarial, numa manifestação que juntou alguns dos principais sindicatos da região ao movimento Ocupar Wall Street.
A manifestação foi convocada por uma coligação de sindicatos de Nova York e por organizações comunitárias, e marcou a junção de esforços entre os sindicalistas e o movimento de denúncia do sistema financeiro que mantém uma acampada no parque Zucotti, no centro de Nova York, desde o dia 17 de Setembro.
Os manifestantes, entre trabalhadores e estudantes, gritaram palavras de ordem como “Nós somos os 99 por cento” e “Ocupar Wall Street, ocupar todos os dias”. O ponto culminante desta manifestação foi justamente o parque Zucotti.
“Está aqui uma grande secção transversal da sociedade”, disse o jornalista investigativo e escritor Jeremy Scahill ao jornal Socialist Worker. “De estudantes a metalúrgicos, de canalizadores a trabalhadores de trânsito e a jornalistas independentes, todos marchando juntos, mostram que a iniciativa está a começar a mudar para o lado do povo.”
“Este é o tipo de movimento necessário à América de hoje. O movimento Ocupar Wall Street provou no curto prazo que é sustentável, que não é apenas um fogacho. O movimento sindical pode adoptar estas questões novamente”, disse Mike Hellstrom, representante da sede sindical Laborers 1108.
Bob Master, sindicalista dos trabalhadores de comunicações da América, disse à multidão: “Olhem em volta. É assim a democracia. Ocupar Wall Street captura o espírito do nosso tempo. Isto é Madison. Isto é o Cairo. Isto é a Tunísia. Ocupar Wall Street iniciou um movimento de que todos nós somos parte, em todo o mundo.”
A manifestação desta quarta-feira foi muito diferente da maioria das manifestações sindicais. Por um lado, trabalhadores de sindicatos de diferentes estavam misturados na multidão, indicando que a maior parte deles chegara ao protesto por conta própria, em vez de terem sido mobilizados pelos seus sindicatos. A excepção foram as centenas de membros das Enfermeiras Nacionais Unidas, que vieram de tão longe quanto Chicago, Washington D.C., e Filadélfia.
No seu blog no The New York Times, o economista Prémio Nobel Paul Krugman escreve, referindo-se ao Ocupar Wall Street, que “este pode ser o início de alguma coisa ao mesmo tempo grande e boa”.
Q: I hear that Adbusters organized Occupy Wall Street? Or Anonymous? Or US Day of Rage? Just who put this together anyway?
A: All of the above, and more. Adbusters made the initial call in mid-July, and also produced a very sexy poster with a ballerina posed atop the Charging Bull statue and riot police in the background. US Day of Rage, the mainly internet-based creation of IT strategist Alexa O’Brien, got involved too and did a lot of the early legwork and tweeting. Anonymous—in its various and multiform visages—joined in late August. On the ground in New York, though, most of the planning was done by people involved in the NYC General Assembly, a collection of activists, artists and students first convened by folks who had been involved in New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts. That coalition of students and union workers had just finished a three-week occupation near City Hall called Bloombergville protesting the mayor’s plans for budget cuts and layoffs. They had learned from the experience and were itching to do it again, this time with the hope of having a bigger impact. But no one person or group is running the Wall Street occupation entirely.
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So nobody is in charge? How do decisions get made?
The General Assembly has become the de facto decision-making body for the occupation at Liberty Plaza, just a few blocks north of Wall Street. (That was Zuccotti Park’s name before 2006, when the space was rebuilt by Brookfield Properties and renamed after its chairman, John Zuccotti.) Get ready for jargon: the General Assembly is a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought, and it’s akin to the assemblies that have been driving recent social movements around the world, in places like Argentina, Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and so on. Working toward consensus is really hard, frustrating and slow. But the occupiers are taking their time. When they finally get to consensus on some issue, often after days and days of trying, the feeling is quite incredible. A mighty cheer fills the plaza. It’s hard to describe the experience of being among hundreds of passionate, rebellious, creative people who are all in agreement about something.
Fortunately, though, they don’t need to come to consensus about everything. Working alongside the General Assembly are an ever-growing number of committees and working groups—from Food and Media to Direct Action and Sanitation. Anyone is welcome to join one, and they each do their own thing, working in tacit coordination with the General Assembly as a whole. In the end, the hope is that every individual is empowered to make decisions and act as her or himself, for the good of the group.
What are the demands of the protesters?
Ugh—the zillion-dollar question. Again, the original Adbusters call asked, “What is our one demand?” Technically, there isn’t one yet. In the weeks leading up to September 17, the NYC General Assembly seemed to be veering away from the language of “demands” in the first place, largely because government institutions are already so shot through with corporate money that making specific demands would be pointless until the movement grew stronger politically. Instead, to begin with, they opted to make their demand the occupation itself—and the direct democracy taking place there—which in turn may or may not come up with some specific demand. When you think about it, this act is actually a pretty powerful statement against the corruption that Wall Street has come to represent. But since thinking is often too much to ask of the American mass media, the question of demands has turned into a massive PR challenge.
The General Assembly is currently in the midst of determining how it will come to consensus about unifying demands. It’s a really messy and interesting discussion. But don’t hold your breath.
Everyone in the plaza comes with their own way of thinking about what they’d like to see happen, of course. Along the north end of the plaza, there’s a collage of hundreds of cardboard signs people have made with slogans and demands on them. Bystanders stop and look at them, transfixed, all day long. The messages are all over the place, to be sure, but there’s also a certain coherence to them. That old standby, “People Before Profits,” seems to capture the gist fairly well. But also under discussion are a variety of other issues, ranging from ending the death penalty, to dismantling the military-industrial complex, to affordable healthcare, to more welcoming immigration policies. And more. It can be confusing, but then again these issues are all at some level interconnected.
Some news reports have been painting the protesters as unfocused, or worse, as hopelessly confused and uninformed. Is there any truth to that?
Sure. In a world as complex as ours, we’re all uninformed about most things, even if we know about a few. I remember a police officer remarking of the protesters on the first or second day, “They think they know everything!” That’s how young people generally are. But in this case, noticing the over-concentration of wealth around Wall Street and its outsized influence in politics does not require a detailed grasp of what a hedge fund does or the current selling price of Apple stock. One thing that distinguishes these protesters is precisely their hope that a better world is possible. I might add that, for many Americans, such nonviolent direct action is the only chance of having a political voice, and it deserves to be taken seriously by those of us in the press.
How many people have responded to the Adbusters call? How large is the group? And how large has it ever been?
The original Adbusters call envisioned 20,000 people flooding the Financial District on September 17. A tenth of that probably ended up being there that day. Despite a massive Anonymous-powered online social media blitz, lots of people simply didn’t know about it, and traditional progressive organizations like labor unions and peace groups were uncomfortable signing on to so amorphous an action. Over the course of a difficult first week, with arrests happening just about every day, new faces kept coming, as others filtered out to take a break. The media coverage after last weekend’s mass arrests and alleged police brutality has brought many more. Now, during the day and into the night, one finds 500 or more people in the plaza, and maybe half that sleeping over. At any given time, several thousand people around the world are watching the occupation’s 24/7 livestream online.
Rather than a mass movement from the outset, this occupation has ended up depending on a relatively small number of highly determined, courageous young activists willing to sleep outside and confront police intimidation. But that is changing. As word spreads about it, the crowd has been getting older, more diverse. Already, though, this tactic of a somewhat rowdy occupation has garnered influence far greater than a traditional march would. After all, 20,000 marched on Wall Street on May 12—protesting bank bailouts and budget cuts for state employees—and who remembers that?
What would a “win” look like for the occupation?
Again, that depends on whom you ask. As September 17 approached, the NYC General Assembly really saw its goal, again, not so much as to pass some piece of legislation or start a revolution as to build a new kind of movement. It wanted to foment similar, like-minded assemblies around the city and around the world, which would be a new basis for political organizing in this country, against the overwhelming influence of corporate money. That is starting to happen, as similar occupations are cropping up in dozens of other cities. Another big occupation has been in the making for months, slated to begin on October 6 at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, and the organizers of that have been visiting Liberty Plaza on and off, learning all they can from its successes and mistakes.
I’ve heard some people saying, when Liberty Plaza was swamped with TV news cameras, “We’ve already won!” Others think they’ve hardly begun. Both, in some sense, are true.
Are there cops all over the square? How bad has the police brutality been? If I came there, what are the risks?
The police presence is nonstop, and there have been some very scary encounters with them—which also gave occasion for tremendous acts of courage by protesters. The worst incident was last Saturday, of course, but there has been very little trouble since then. A large contingent of protesters has no intention of getting arrested, and almost nobody is interested in taking pointless risks or instigating violence against people or property. The more that ordinary people join the cause—together with celebrity visitors like Susan Sarandon, Cornel West and Michael Moore—the less likely the police will probably be to try to suppress it. As one sign along Broadway says, “Safety in Numbers! Join Us!”
Nonetheless, challenging the powers that be—and doing so impolitely, outside the bounds of a permit—is never going to be 100 percent safe. To the extent that this movement is effective, it will also carry risks. If you take part, it’s not a bad idea to keep the National Lawyers Guild’s phone number written on your arm, just in case.
If I can’t come to Wall Street, what else can I do?
A lot of people are already taking part in important ways from afar—this is the magic of decentralization. Online, you can watch the livestream, make donations, retweet on Twitter and encourage your friends to get interested. People with relevant skills have been volunteering to help maintain the movement’s websites and edit video—coordinating through IRC chat rooms and other social media. Soon, the formal discussions about demands will be happening online as well as in the plaza. Offline, you can join the numerous similar occupations that are starting up around the country or start your own.
Finally, you can always take the advice that has become one of the several mantras of the movement, expressed this way by one woman at Tuesday night’s General Assembly meeting: “Occupy your own heart,” she said, “not with fear but with love.”
Os 99% que ocuparam Wall Street
Duas mil pessoas ocuparam de facto Wall Street no sábado. A sua mensagem era clara: “Somos os 99% da população que não toleram mais a ganância e a corrupção do 1% restante”.
OPINIAO | 26 SETEMBRO, 2011 - 00:06 | POR AMY GOODMAN
Se dois mil activistas do movimento conservador Tea party se manifestassem em Wall Street, provavelmente haveria a mesma quantidade de jornalistas a cobrir o acontecimento. Duas mil pessoas ocuparam de facto Wall Street no sábado. Não levavam cartazes do Tea party, nem a bandeira de Gadsden com a serpente em espiral juntamente com a ameaça “Não te metas comigo”. Mas a sua mensagem era clara: “Somos os 99% da população que não toleram mais a ganância e a corrupção do 1% restante”, diziam. Ali estava uma maioria de jovens a protestar contra a especulação praticamente incontrolável de Wall Street, que provocou a crise financeira mundial.
Um dos multimilionários mais conhecidos de Nova York, o presidente da Câmara Michael Bloomberg, comentou sobre o momento que vivemos: “Muitos jovens saem da universidade e não encontram trabalho. Foi isso que aconteceu no Cairo e em Madrid. Não queremos este tipo de distúrbios aqui”. Distúrbios? A Primavera Árabe e os protestos na Europa trataram-se disso?
É provável que, para desilusão do presidente da Câmara Bloomberg, o que aconteceu no Egipto e na Europa seja justamente o que inspirou muitas pessoas a ocupar Wall Street. Em comunicado recente, a coligação de organizações que protestam em Nova York informou: “No sábado, realizámos uma assembleia geral com duas mil pessoas. Na segunda-feira, às 20h, ainda estávamos a ocupar a praça, apesar da constante presença policial. Estamos a construir o mundo que queremos, tomando por base as necessidades humanas e a sustentabilidade, no lugar da ganância das empresas”.
Falando de Tea Party, o governador do Texas, Rick Perry, tem provocado polémica durante os debates presidenciais republicanos com a sua declaração de que o elogiado sistema de segurança social dos Estados Unidos é “um esquema do tipo Ponzi”. Charles Ponzi dedicou-se a fraudar milhares de pessoas em 1920 com a promessa enganosa de que receberiam enormes ganhos a partir de investimentos. Um típico esquema Ponzi consiste em tomar o dinheiro de vários investidores e pagá-los com o dinheiro de novos investidores, em vez de pagar a partir de ganhos reais. O sistema de segurança social dos Estados Unidos é de facto sério: tem um fundo confiável de mais de 2,6 mil milhões de dólares. O verdadeiro esquema que ameaça o povo norte-americano é a insaciável ganância dos bancos de Wall Street.
Entrevistei um dos organizadores do protesto “Ocupemos Wall Street”. David Graeber é professor em Goldsmiths, Universidade de Londres, e é autor de vários livros. A sua obra mais recente é Dívida: os primeiros 5.000 anos. Graeber assinala que, no meio da crise financeira de 2008, renegociaram-se dívidas enormes de bancos. No entanto, pouquíssimas hipotecas receberam o mesmo tratamento. Graeber disse: “As dívidas entre os mais ricos ou entre governos podem sempre ser renegociadas e, de facto, sempre foi assim na história mundial. Não estão gravadas em pedras. Em termos gerais, quando os pobres têm dívidas com os ricos, automaticamente as dívidas convertem-se numa obrigação sagrada, mais importante do que qualquer outra coisa. A ideia de renegociá-las é impensável”.
O presidente Barack Obama propôs recentemente um plano de criação de emprego e maiores esforços para reduzir o défice público. Uma das propostas é o chamado “imposto sobre os milionários”, que conta com o apoio do multimilionário e partidário de Obama Warren Buffet. Os republicanos denominaram o imposto de “guerra de classes”.
Graeber explica: “Durante os últimos 30 anos vimos os mais ricos da nossa sociedade liderarem uma guerra política contra todos os demais, e esta é considerada a mais recente disputa, uma medida totalmente disfuncional do ponto de vista político e económico. Esse é o motivo pelo qual os jovens simplesmente abandonaram qualquer ideia de recorrer aos políticos. Todos sabemos o que acontecerá. Os impostos de Obama são uma espécie de simulação com carácter populista, que todos sabem que será rechaçado. Na realidade, o que provavelmente vai acontecer é que haverá mais cortes nos serviços sociais”.
Lá fora, na manhã fria de quarta-feira, os manifestantes iniciaram o quarto dia de protestos com uma marcha no meio de forte presença policial. Fizeram soar a campainha de abertura da “bolsa do povo” às 9h30, exactamente na mesma hora em que soa a campainha da Bolsa de Nova York. Enquanto os banqueiros continuam seguros dentro dos seus bancos resgatados, lá fora, a polícia prende manifestantes. Num mundo justo, com uma economia justa, caberia perguntar: quem deveria estar a passar frio lá fora? Quem deveria ser preso?
