THIS IS WHY I OCCUPY
in their own words...
in their own words...
“I guess people are here for a variety of reasons; it's sort of an umbrella movement. But, I think that people are generally unified under a kind of disgust with the corporate control of politics in the electoral process - particularly in terms of unrestricted campaign donations, or minimally restricted donations. I'm here because what I'm most upset about is the absolute inability to practice Democracy under the - power of capital, basically.”
"I'm from Queens originally, in New York. I'm actually a business student. I was learning about finance and all this stuff, but then - actually I dropped from finance to accounting because the whole business behind derivatives and stock market hedge funds was really shady for me. And so I just couldn't take it. I'm still contemplating whether to still be a business major, but right now that's the reasonable choice for me. Even though – maybe in the future I might get a job with one of these banks – I'm still against their whole policies, starting from what caused the recession. Especially the hedge funds and all the things they do like derivatives. It's like they give you out loans based on money they don't have, which is wrong. And people basically lose their houses and their cars and everything and a lot of them – they don't have houses or anything and they're basically on the streets. I think that's just wrong. It shouldn't be done.”
"'Why isn't everybody here?' is a better question. It should be obvious why everyone is here. Basically, a growth economy is a Ponzi scam and – sooner or later – the bottom is going to fall out of that pyramid there. Right now it's already starting to crumble; they just keep putting band-aids on it.”
“Basically this a peaceful protest that is just trying to make a point where the people still have power – to kind of say what they need to say, get a point across, or at least just make awareness to certain corruption / greed in the government and in banking institutions. That's the overall jist of it. Personally I decided to come because of all of the tax breaks that happened from the financial institutions where the average American pays more taxes than Bank of America. The way I would describe it is we need to step up or we need to bring them down. In this case – without being violent – we need to step up. And this is a form of us stepping up and showing our power. It's not like trying to say – it's not anarchistic, but it's just trying to push towards a better goal for more people.”
“Well, I just read this in the paper yesterday, because I don't have a computer up and running yet. My wife just got one; she's just learning how to do e-mail. So, we're very primitive. But – in any case – I find out things and I put this little sign together last night and decided that I'd skip my Vets for Peace vigil in Forest Hills and come down here and I've been here most of the day already.”
"Well, I live in Brooklyn now so it was easy for me to get here, but I'm actually - I'm amazed how many people are from all over the world here. There are people from Portugal and Spain; it's unbelievable. We really have a worldwide thing and that's – that's part of it. Right now – as I hear people talk – a lot of us feel we're in the minority but we really aren't; we're the majority in this country. Eighty percent of the country now feels that we're on the wrong track. Only 15% of thepopulation agrees with the policies of the United States Congress. Under 40% agrees with Obama. We have a system that no one approves of and, yet, we're not entertaining any actual discussion about how we should fix it and that's – that's what this is here – is we have a real understanding of what is wrong with our country what is wrong with our system. We want to fix it and – ya know, we're going to get demonized. We're going to get demonized by everyone. Everyone's going to say that we're radicals or evil – that we don't care about anything, that we just want chaos and destruction. But it's so the opposite of he truth. You walk around here and you see people, ya know, bringing giant tubs of peanut butter and leaving it out where anyone can just grab it. People taking bags of apples and just dropping it in the middle of the place for anyone to get; there's one person eating one right now! Ya know, we live in a society of hate and everyone here just really doesn't want that anymore. And we tried the democratic thing; we elected Obama, who ran on change and then what did we get? We got more wars. We got more violence. We got more destruction and it's unacceptable. It's unacceptable and we're here to say that.”
“It's really quick financial reform. So, getting money out of Washington. We need a divide where politicians function on their own and don't have to rely on this money for ads and campaign money. We've gotta divide where the financial industry doesn't influence them in the direction that they want the country to go. Instead it should be influenced in the way where the People want it to go. So, it's kind of this sign. Most of us can't afford a lobbyist to do that, so in actuality we all have no say in government. Ya know – like right now – my friend was telling me Obama's here in New York meeting with the financial guys at a dinner at $70,000 a plate; a working class person can't go there and voice their view.”
“I heard about it from my friend through Facebook and once I heard, I knew I had to be here. It was just – it was everything that I wanted – all the things that I think are wrong with the country, these people think are wrong with the country. And we don't know how we're gonna fix it, but I just knew I had to be here. I had to be here. I don't know how else to explain it.”
“I'm on a break right now. I actually started out here on Saturday, in my jeans and T-shirt with everybody else. I got here late on Saturday – probably around three o'clock – spent maybe four or five hours here and then I came here yesterday as well for about the same amount of time. And I'm out here because – like the majority of thinking people, or even half awake people – I'm pretty sick and tired of Corporate American and Wall Street policies. I mean it just seems like the levels of austerity that are being leveled against us – the working class, the poor – are just getting increasingly obnoxious yet it seems that most of us are still kind of sleeping at the wheel. Ya know, corporations are doing a really good job at tranquilizing the public at large. We've got American Idol. We've got the Housewives of Blah-blah City or County or whatever. We've got a whole mess of social distractions in place to lull us into sleep and to prevent us from really seeing the big picture. So, that's why I'm here. I feel like I really need to raise a voice to this. Even if I'm just one voice, I'm kind of a big mouth so it at least helps me blow off a little bit of steam, too. It's kind of half-way therapeutic but I also help it does some good.”
“I'm not here as an individual; I'm here as a group of people who truly believe that this country or the financial system is in ruins. There's too much corruption going on in our financial system. Take, of instance, an individual like myself. I just graduated from college. I have $40,000 in tuition that's owed as debt. Why can't I get a job to pay off those bills if this country is supposed to be so wealthy and have so many jobs, that are available for everyone? Why is it I can't get my fair share? I did everything I was supposed to do. I went to school. I did the right thing and it's still not working out the way it's supposed to work out for me. What happened? Where did we go wrong? That's why I'm here. I need answers as to where we went wrong and what we can do – solutions so that this doesn't happen again. To me or future generations.”
“Essentially the unifying theme that we all share is that this is an anthropological issue. History has shown us that competitive exchange systems don't work. They always fail. From ancient Egypt to Easter Island. We have to switch to a cooperative system before we're all gone.”
“I'm here because I wanted to be a part of starting a dialogue about what's going on in this country because as problems escalate we're kind of bearing it under the carpet. I think it's important to at least bring up the subject. That's why I'm here.”
“I'm here because I want to see actual real morals instead of real greed.”
“I'm here because I'm dissatisfied with corporate greed on Wall Street and in our government. I think it's absurd and illegal that corporations are being treated as individuals. They're not. They're corporations. They should be helping people – normal people who want to start small businesses where people want to get a cup of coffee or something. They shouldn't be trying to ruin people's lives by taking all the money out of the public sector and into their own bank accounts.”
“The end of corporate personhood and the end of twenty-something-year-olds being slaves to the banks.”
“I'm here because I wanted to participate in something grassroots, something tangible, that I could get behind. I'm shooting this, I'm making a film, and I'm also participating as a demonstrator.”
"I go to high school in Brooklyn and recently there's been a lot of budget cuts. We've had a lot of things taken away. It costs $50 to take an art class and we're required four art classes to graduate. So it's $200 just to graduate. Plus other expenses. And crucial state-wide tests we're taking in January when we've always taken them in June. Fortunately, Bloomberg and other anonymous donators donated like $250,000 each so we got some things back. But it's becoming harder to graduate because there's no money. Our funding is dismally low and I'm here to tell them to stop funding the wars and start funding education, start funding the schools because – ya know, I feel bad for the incoming freshman. There are over 1,000 incoming freshman in my school and - I mean, we have no money! What are we going to do? Because of No Child Left Behind we can't lower that bar, it's illegal, so we're losing money but we're still having the same amount of kids. That doesn't make any sense. All that money that's going to the wars is draining us. That's why I'm here.”
“I'm here because I feel it's my duty. I feel like as a citizen I should be here right now, because what else should I be doing right now? Continuing the cycle? No.”
“I'm here because I feel that our current economic system of Americanized capitalism is incredibly exploitative and I'm really disturbed by the degree of exploitation that American consumerism brings to other countries in the world. Like the impact we have in other countries supplying labor forces and destroying the way that other cultures have traded and lived and destroying other economic structures, historically. That's sort of a broad aspect of why I'm here. Why I'm here specifically is the degree of power – it's always been really strong, the influence that Wall Street has on the U.S. political system. Has been really strong since the 80s. Recent manifestations of that being carried out are incredible. Abusive lending practices led to the housing crisis. And a lot of people made a lot of money out of betting against people. Poor people who were taking out those loans. They're saying, “Hey. We know you won't be able to pay this off, but we're going to make a bet against you the same time we take your money. And then in the end of it we're going to get huge amounts of returns because you're homeless now.” That's really disturbing and the effects that have gone through the entire economy have hit me and my family personally. My dad was laid off. My brother has the prospect of being laid off because they both work in small manufacturing in a town that's always been a manufacturing-based town. And the labor that they were performing there is going to be outsourced to a place where they don't really know how to perform that labor and they're going to be paid substantially less. It isn't going to have a positive impact on the people who are getting those jobs, and definitely not on the people who are losing them. People living in America. But it will be good for the people trying to meet the black at the end of the year and pay out bonuses. So things like Citizens United really disturbed me, the courts being controlled by neoliberals, the fact that we can't have serious consideration of tax hikes for people who are making exorbitant amounts of money off of this incredibly exploitative sort of system. Sort of like diffuse and always present nature of conservative ideology in America and I think there's been a huge disconnect even on the left that social issues that we're fighting for – gay rights, equal rights for people of color, access to legal representation – the fact that those issues are always spoken about separately and not really spoken about like they are intertwined with how the economic system works. So, if I can talk about things like that, to people like you, and I can reach out to people and say, 'Hey, I'm thinking about these things. You should be thinking about them, too. We have a lot in common.' Then I'll have done something while I'm here, seeing where they're coming from and where I'm coming from.”
“I'm here because I'm sick and tired of the way they've been running things. Since, really – I guess – forever. Especially, you look back in history how even at the turn of the last century how they were just fucking everybody over and how right now they're doing the same shit all these years later and no one's gone after 'em. And everybody's just being complacent about it and we're tired of it. We want to see something happen. We want to do something that really can be powerful enough and this – for me it's activism. I really want to be active in all the movements surrounding this cause here.”
“So I'm tired of being a slave; I need my freedom back. And I need New Yorkers down here to support this cause because our future depends on it and we're making history. Get down here, People! We love you.”
“I'm here because there is an extreme gap between the rich and the poor in this country - something that has been kind of shoved up under the rug for a long time. Something that has been mis-appropriated by the Republican Party in this country as a 'debt problem', but what is really a – ya know, what we think of as privilege in this country. What we think of as privilege is not owning appliances or a television. It is being able to live freely, live happily, and live comfortably. It's in the Constitution. It's something that we all need to fight for because we all have a say in this and we should not let giant multinational corporations stick their noses in – more so – where they don't belong. I'm here specifically because there was a Supreme Court decision - not too long ago - called 'The CitizensUnited versus the FEC' that basically gave corporations unlimited rights to donate to politicians war chests. And when politics becomes more about money and less about people's needs and wants – and let's face it corporations are not people. They're not going to have the needs and wants of average people. Their primary orientation is towards profit and not toward living life. They're not alive, per se. And when you give corporations the same rights as individuals you run down a very slippery slope, where you end up legitimizing the kind of behavior that you see got us into this mess in the first place. So, we're here as kind of a correcting influence. We are here to get our voices out and to explain that our positions – and as diffuse as they may be – but the important part is that we're here and we're exercising our rights and we're gonna stay here. And we'll be here, even after this protest ends.”
“I'm pretty personally effected by how shitty things are right now. I recently had health problems – like two months ago and now I'm in – I already had about $10,000 worth of medical debt and now I'm about $16,000 and I had to spend. I couldn't even just put it all where I didn't have to pay for it. I had to pay for testing and to get treatment and to figure out what was going on. So, I spent all my money and I had to move out of my apartment and I'm living with my boyfriend right now. But that can't – I mean I shouldn't do that that long. And I have no money. And I can't go to the dentist. I can't really go to the doctor. They harass me all the time, call my phone -seriously – like five times a day and don't say anything. Yeah – I mean, I'm pretty effected by how shitty things are, I guess.”
“I'm here because I don't believe anyone deserves to suffer. We are entitled to equal and natural rights. That everyone should have food to eat, a place to stay, clothing on their back, and shelter over their head. I am here because I believe in a divine plan for universal love and we don't need corporations to take care of us because obviously they're not doing a good job.”
“It's a new kind of revolution and I want to be there when it began. We need to do this for 'We the People' and get our country back from the psychopaths that are running things now. Because I didn't watch my kids and neighbors kids -and friends and family - grow up to die in endless wars and grow up in poverty. That's why.”
“I guess people are here for a variety of reasons. It's sort of an umbrella movement. But, I think that people are generally unified under a kind of disgust with the corporate control of politics in the electoral process, particularly in respect to unrestricted campaign donations or minimally restricted donations. So I'm here because what I'm most upset about is the direct inability to practice democracy under the power of capital, basically.”
CHICAGO
"I'd like to see corporate personhood repealed. I'd like to see all private funds taken out of elections and go to public elections. I'd like to see us out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and close down Guantanamo. I'd like to see the elimination of the Federal Reserve and go to a national bank. What else? I'd like to see Medicare Part E be implemented, so we'd have Medicare for all, national healthcare. I would like to see us get out of our trade policies – NAFTA, GAT and Panama and Columbia free trade policies that we seem to be doing, that we seem to be heading towards And I'd like to see the reinforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up media consolidation. I think that'd be a great start.”
“I'm here for the 99% of people who don't even know to fight for themselves. I'm here to show solidarity, to represent the take down of corporate-indentured-slave-itude. I think it's important for all of us to stand together, regardless of party lines – Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, it doesn't matter – we all have one common objective. And for me that common objective comes down to love. That's the most important thing. And we need to remember it – as humanity, we need to show solidarity and – try to convey that.”
“I was ten years old in '68 and that was...impressive. Ya know, my lessons growing up were 'question authority' and it's regressed. I mean, look at the size of this. We should be blocking off the streets with people, with the problems we have in this country. And it's just depressing. So I don't think we've progressed at all in terms of demonstrations. I don't know what it's going to take for the American people to wake up to what's going on. They say if a peaceful protest isn't allowed that a violent revolution is inevitable. We allow protests here, but they aren't happening. I'm very disappointed with the progressive movement in this country. And I think Obama's got a lot to blame for that because he was voted into office by people who were expecting change. He ran on 'Change We Can Believe In' and there's been no change. There's been the status quo. It's been Bush policy on steroids and, you know, look who he's just appointed to the deputy of the FDA: the chief lobbyist for Monsanto, who pushed through the genetically modified food legislation. Now he's in charge of the FDA. Look who his new chief of staff is: Bill Daley, who comes out of the banking industry, who is just a corporatist. My point is that Obama is such a disappointment to the progressive movement that I'm afraid the progressives aren't going to come out and vote at all. The elections will go to the Republicans just because the wind has been taken out of our sales. We can still recapture it but look at this – look at the size of this. This ain't gonna do it.”
“People are scared. Because you don't want to take that first step and find out you're alone.”
“We're both students at DePaul and I got an e-mail from my department about it. We're always talking about how we're concerned about corporations and how they're basically running our lives and our government. Then once we heard about this we were like, 'this is what we want'.”
“I'm here because I'm conscious of what's going on. I've seen the global impact that this kind of corporate mindset has with wealth and poverty and congruencies and inequalities that exist in real life, let alone just in this country.”
“For people like - like my aunt the other day. She was saying that we don't like that the Citizens United – that companies can spend whatever – and she has her money invested in a fund that invests in top five companies. But her money – she doesn't know where it's going – what cause or what candidate it's supporting. So we're going to take all our money out of there and put it somewhere else because we don't think they should be able to anonymously donate to someone with our money. I mean businesses are okay, but once they get too big and they start paying their CEOs like millions and they get bonuses for cutting people's wages and cutting debt and sending jobs overseas. They do that and they get a huge million dollar bonus while people get their jobs cut and they don't mind. It seems like they want our economy to fail. It's not American.”
“It's ridiculous. If you go up the chain you find out there's like six companies left and all the rest are just names. And I tried to start a small business. I couldn't do it. The bigger businesses of the variation that I was starting could buy wholesale. They could buy everything cheaper than I could. I had to buy in bulk; they got wholesale. I'm sitting there and I have to mark up 20%. They have to mark up 2%. I can't keep customers like that. I'm homeless now because this economy sucks. I'm living out of a bag and have been for the past two weeks.”
“I'm here because everything sucks. Because I walk around every day and see people ignore each other. I see so many rich people and then I go home - I bike home and there's so many poor people, so many people who feel defeated, who feel like they can't do anything about what's messed up about everything right now.”
“I feel that if we're going to treat corporations like people, then we should treat people like they're corporations. Treat people with respect and dignity. The corporations got their bailout but the people who bought those bogus loans are still stuck with the debt.”
“We were actually just calculating the taxes on our student loans just for this year. We're in law school. First of all the bailouts – they need the bailouts because they gave bad loans to people under the guise of helping. They did not. They lost a bunch of money, they were bailed out with our tax money which they lost of bad investments. So we pay them to lose our money and then we had to pay them because they lost our money. It's insane. And that money comes from taxes from student loans and taxes on just normal investments that average human beings are trying to make – not necessarily so they can even have a sustainable future for themselves, but so they can pay their mortgage next week. You know, it's insane.”
“The government response to the failure of the American financial system is to raise taxes on poor people and the working class. And why should they not have to pay for their own catastrophic failures? So if you're a student, and for some reason next year you lose your subsidized student loan due to the crisis our nation's in you're now – every year that you lost your subsidized loan for – you had a $500 tax increase and yet virtually every member of our government has rejected any tax increase on the people who caused the problems.”
“We graduated like four or five months ago and with our degrees we couldn't get a job. So we were stuck going to law school. Political Science. So the thing about school is we have to take out $50,000 in debt right there. It's an $150,000 windfall that we have and if we mess it up and we don't get a job, we're stuck with it. But when our financial institutions do things like that – make a bad investment – they get it paid off. So why we wouldn't get that same respect makes no sense to me.”
“I think capitalism – as bad as it is for us here – ya know, we should have ample reason to protest – it's also the other side of it. Places like Latin America – have literally been genocides and starvation and all sorts of just – human rights atrocities. And for what?”
“What's going on in this country – it's not right. There's a lot of corruption. People getting bailouts – that money should be going to the People first. But the banks are just depositing it and it's not tricklin' down to the People. If we're not spending the money, then what's going on where they can't create jobs for us? Because if we've got jobs then we're spending'. Then the economies doing well. Won't have no problems.”
“I was under the impression we value things like education and production. Apparently that's not the case. We can modify things like financial devices, as if that's something that – like that's a service that actually requires capital in exchange for. We can modify all these horseshit services. In the mean time those that are actually producing, those that are educating themselves, trying to better the human condition – they're the ones that are penalized. Not the ones who can modify shit out of thin air. It's crazy, it's insane.”
“We all need to start breaking away from our dependency on them. As long as we're dependent on institutes they control, they can shut if down at any time until we beg for mercy. Of course the reason they haven't done that is the moment they do that a lot more people will be here. So they don't use that, they use the threat of that.”
“I work with U.S. Uncut –started up in the U.K. So that's basically my big issue – is ending corporate tax avoidance. The deregulation. The elimination of Glass-Steagall. And at the very core of it is: money in politics, has to go. And I'm sorry, that also includes special interest. Special interest, corporations – the money has to be removed from our system or we're screwed and that's being proved right now by the fact that our government is so isolated from what's really happening out here. You can see it. It's exactly what's going on. So, that's why I'm here. I was absolutely over the moon when I saw that Occupy Wall Street happened. And they're still there. And they're still going strong. When I saw this Facebook page and the wall, I instantly put it out to the U.S. Uncut Chicago group and hopefully we're going to see a lot of them out here. It's a large group – online – a lot of supporters, but there's not a lot of feet in the street throughout this."
“Because I don't have a job. I have a kid. I have two college degrees and I can't find work. It sucks. I could work at Target or something, but it wouldn't really pay my bills. I didn't go to school all this time just to like sit on job boards. My degree is in Public Relations and then my Masters is in Communications. I've been a teacher. But, now I'm just sort of like, 'Well, shit.' I got a little – well, she's almost six – a little six-year-old kid. It's great. She's brilliant. And I want to tell her, 'It's gonna be okay. You're gonna grow up and have a good world to live in, but that's kind of not the way it is right now.”
“Stop the bailout of banks who don't help the mainstream people. It's our money. You're spending it way too much so – give it back to the people.”
