What drew me to Occupy was this fight for social justice that I had been waiting on, something that was finally addressing issues of concern and issues of survival for people like myself and others who are suffering here in America for a variety of reasons. In the beginning, I was a homeless individual, and I came down one day because they said something about free dinner or free lunch. I came down about three weeks to a month into the occupation. I almost immediately after that joined the Outreach working group and after that the Visions and Goals working group and then from there the Movement Building group. That was my introduction. I was living in a shelter at the time, so a free meal and a good meal was a great thing, and I had already had a sense of what a social justice movement was about. All the talk about the 99% and the 1% and the talk about how wealth is so concentrated in a few individual’s hands and a few corporation’s hands, It just resonated with me.
When the financial collapse happened in 2007/ 2008, it affected me directly. I had a small business, a consulting business, and I lost a lot of business. I wasn’t making millions of dollars. I wasn’t even close to a 1%er or even in the middle class, but I was making enough to support and sustain myself. I was affected directly by that whole financial meltdown, and we found out later that it was engineered by the banks and some of the corporations that took advantage of Clinton’s idea of trying to get everyone into a home, whether people could pay for that mortgage or not. The housing collapse, the housing meltdown played a big role in that collapse. I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know it until we started doing walking tours of Wall Street and started doing research on what happened in 2008. In this country, there is this idea that if you give tax breaks to the wealthy or tax breaks to corporations, they are going to hire people and generate income for the rest of the population, but it doesn’t work like that. I’m not against big businesses and corporations that treat their workers right in terms of offering union benefits, a pension, some sort of safety net. A lot of times these companies often don’t do right by their employees.
They also control the political process of this country. The Citizen’s United ruling is an example of that. I think a lot of us in Occupy were actually Obama supporters. I know I supported Obama the first time around. I didn't think that radical, revolutionary change would come, but I did believe he would bring about a real change. I thought he would at least take on Wall Street and the corporations and do some of the other things he said he was going to do. He did the very opposite, and now we have the NDAA. Guantanamo Bay is still open. If you look at his overall policies, he’s outdoing Bush in a bad way. It’s kind of hard for people to go against him because he’s African American. He’s handsome. He’s seems to be a nice guy and a nice father. When you look at drone strikes and how the corporations support him and the legislation that he passes, you can see through it, but a lot of people can’t.
When the financial collapse happened in 2007/ 2008, it affected me directly. I had a small business, a consulting business, and I lost a lot of business. I wasn’t making millions of dollars. I wasn’t even close to a 1%er or even in the middle class, but I was making enough to support and sustain myself. I was affected directly by that whole financial meltdown, and we found out later that it was engineered by the banks and some of the corporations that took advantage of Clinton’s idea of trying to get everyone into a home, whether people could pay for that mortgage or not. The housing collapse, the housing meltdown played a big role in that collapse. I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know it until we started doing walking tours of Wall Street and started doing research on what happened in 2008. In this country, there is this idea that if you give tax breaks to the wealthy or tax breaks to corporations, they are going to hire people and generate income for the rest of the population, but it doesn’t work like that. I’m not against big businesses and corporations that treat their workers right in terms of offering union benefits, a pension, some sort of safety net. A lot of times these companies often don’t do right by their employees.
They also control the political process of this country. The Citizen’s United ruling is an example of that. I think a lot of us in Occupy were actually Obama supporters. I know I supported Obama the first time around. I didn't think that radical, revolutionary change would come, but I did believe he would bring about a real change. I thought he would at least take on Wall Street and the corporations and do some of the other things he said he was going to do. He did the very opposite, and now we have the NDAA. Guantanamo Bay is still open. If you look at his overall policies, he’s outdoing Bush in a bad way. It’s kind of hard for people to go against him because he’s African American. He’s handsome. He’s seems to be a nice guy and a nice father. When you look at drone strikes and how the corporations support him and the legislation that he passes, you can see through it, but a lot of people can’t.
I remember coming on the day the mayor threatened to shut the occupation down for cleaning. I remember seeing people cleaning it themselves. It was good to see a library there. It was good to see the meals there, comfort there. It represented a whole different paradigm, a dynamic of what society could and should look like. I thought that it represented what America and what the world could look like. We should have an emphasis on libraries and knowledge. People should be able to eat freely and clothes themselves and house themselves and feel a sense of unity. When I first came into the movement, I remember a nice looking young lady invited me to an Outreach meeting. She invited me, and I just said, “Oh wow, this is a nice looking lady. Maybe there are more like her, so I’ll go to the meeting.” Then, when I went to the first Outreach meeting, I immediately was attracted and immediately got involved in the movement.
When I was in Outreach, they needed me to go out to the assemblies. We had like twelve or thirteen different assemblies at the time, and they needed someone of color to go out to different assemblies and make sure we all stayed connected. We were planning on doing a big action on November 17th that was citywide, that I eventually went out to coordinate with all of the assemblies in the city. That was my take off point. From there, I wanted to know exactly where the movement wanted to go. Did it have demands? Did it have visions and goals, so I joined the Visions and Goals working group and the Movement Building group.
The occupation was good, but when they raided us, we still had a movement in place at the time. We had our biggest action two days after the raid. I was always interested in us challenging Wall Street, having Zuccotti Park as a place where people could see and model a community, but I was also interested in how we could connect with occupy movements in Harlem , in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in Staten Island. My thing was that if we were a 99% movement, we needed to have an Occupy Wall Street movement, but Occupy Wall Street is all streets. We need to have everyone come together. I felt like the message of Occupy was loose and fluid enough to apply to different communities throughout the city, and I started organizing with those different communities for citywide and local actions.
When I was in Outreach, they needed me to go out to the assemblies. We had like twelve or thirteen different assemblies at the time, and they needed someone of color to go out to different assemblies and make sure we all stayed connected. We were planning on doing a big action on November 17th that was citywide, that I eventually went out to coordinate with all of the assemblies in the city. That was my take off point. From there, I wanted to know exactly where the movement wanted to go. Did it have demands? Did it have visions and goals, so I joined the Visions and Goals working group and the Movement Building group.
The occupation was good, but when they raided us, we still had a movement in place at the time. We had our biggest action two days after the raid. I was always interested in us challenging Wall Street, having Zuccotti Park as a place where people could see and model a community, but I was also interested in how we could connect with occupy movements in Harlem , in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in Staten Island. My thing was that if we were a 99% movement, we needed to have an Occupy Wall Street movement, but Occupy Wall Street is all streets. We need to have everyone come together. I felt like the message of Occupy was loose and fluid enough to apply to different communities throughout the city, and I started organizing with those different communities for citywide and local actions.
The group I’m involved in now is Occu Evolve. We are involved in several struggles right now. We are a group of various working groups inside of Occupy Wall Street as well as different general assemblies around the city. We’ve been involved in the successful Hot & Crusty boycott and strike. We helped them get unionized. They were a group of low paid “immigrant” workers that now have a union contract. We’ve been working with Occupy Kensington in Brooklyn in a strike against Golden Farm, which is also an immigrant worker’s struggle. Also, we’ve been working out in Staten Island with Occupy Sandy. We have a thing called Occupy Sandy Resistance, which is not just about relief or restoration but actually fighting against the ongoing or oncoming gentrification in Sandy areas. We found out about three weeks ago that the mayor is the one who decides where the 1.7 billion dollars goes for relief, and we don’t have a resistance against that. He’s already proposed that an executive from Goldman Sachs be an administrator for where the tax payer funded, people funded relief funds go. This is a big issue. We’re also in contact with people out in the Rockaways. We try to mobilize people to speak out when there are hearings and ask why some of these homes were built on such low-lying land. Some of these places should have never been built.
We’ve also been involved with the Kimani Gray movement, the sixteen-year-old youth that was killed by the police in March. We are in talks with community members and different people about possibly starting an Occupy East Flatbush community assembly, so the people there can organize amongst themselves. We’ve also reached out to people in Flatbush who are also interested in starting an Occupy Flatbush chapter. It’s not like we’re going in there telling them what to do, but we’ve been organizing with different occupies, trying to help them organize a space where they can have community and where they can talk and they can organize campaigns, community centers, different things for the community there. We have members who are also working with Stop and Frisk issues, and we are working with Occupy the Pipeline.
With different general assemblies, we’ve also been instrumental in making sure that they have a structure that’s healthy, that doesn’t end up like Occupy Wall Street. We don’t even have an assembly now because we didn’t have community agreements, and we didn’t have shared values.
We’re also trying to help set-up an assembly at 520 Clinton, which was an Occupy Sandy headquarters. I think they’re calling that the People’s Network, and I think that will be set-up sometime this summer. Also, we’ve been doing what we call the OCI (Occupy Crime Scene Investigation) Wall Street walking tour, which focuses on banks connected to Wall Street as well as the African presence on Wall Street. The African people were instrumental in building Wall Street, and 15,000 are still buried right underneath that street. There was a slave port there. There is a lot of history there that people don’t know about. There are about 10 to 12 groups meeting on an ongoing basis trying to bring back Occupy in a way that’s really inclusive of the 99%.
It’s important because the powers that be are still in power. Even though we’re still a relatively wealthy country in a lot of ways, we’re still under a corporatocracy, where the corporations really have the final say. You can’t even really get close to people in power unless you can pay at least 300,000 dollars a plate to hear someone speak, so the people are still suffering in a lot of ways. The corporations are still running things here in America, and we have a need to get together and continue building a movement for social change, as well as a movement to really develop a sense of real community, a sense of real love for humanity in this country, in this world. Living under imperialism and capitalism makes that very, very hard in an individualistic society. These are part and parcel reasons why this movement is still necessary and that communities still organize amongst themselves, from gentrification to police brutality to people not having the power over their lives and corporations having too much power over things in this country and in this world.
There is a lot going on in so called communities of color. There is a lot of economic deprivation. There’s gentrification going on. There are a lot of issues that make it hard to live in communities like where Kimani Gray came from, the East Flatbush community. In a lot of those places, there’s a lack of community centers and jobs, and to compound all of this, there’s also a sort of horizontal violence that goes on with black on black or brown on brown crime, gang activity and things of that nature, but the biggest issue is that the community doesn’t control itself, doesn’t have control of its institutions, its schools, its businesses, and then there is the employment issue or lack of employment issue. All of this builds an environment that isn’t healthy. Then, you have Stop and Frisk, which is a program that is supposedly about making sure that communities like that are safe from potential criminals, and it’s a system that’s created by the NYPD and the 1% of this city that just ends up targeting poor people of African descent and Latinos that are stopped and frisked because there’s an assumption that the young men are criminals.
It relates to Wall Street because Stop and Frisk leads to mass incarceration. Mass incarceration leads to the prison industrial complex, which Wall Street benefits off of. There is a direct correlation. Right now, the prison industry is a big industry that Wall Street profits off of as well as the immigration issue. There are a lot of people who are so called illegal immigrants who are part of the prison industrial complex, which again Wall Street benefits off of. We saw the connection between that. Occupy Wall Street isn’t just us going after corporations or trying to occupy physically Zuccotti Park or Wall Street. It’s a movement that says that really everything goes back to Wall Street, this whole profit centered society that profits off of everybody, including people’s misery. There’s always a lot of talk about the quality of life of New Yorkers, but what about the quality of life of people like Kimani, who no longer has his life? What about the quality of life of people in East Flatbush, in Harlem, in the Bronx? We don’t talk about those things.
There’s an effort now to have an inspector general to monitor Stop and Frisk activities that the mayor has said no to, that Ray Kelly has said no to. The mayor even went on record saying that if we stop Stop and Frisk, crime will rise and killings will return and New York will turn back to the eighties and nineties. To me, that’s a racist statement because it says, “If you don’t stop and frisk and harass young black and Latina people and pat them down, there will be more crime." They are saying that we are potential criminals and killers, yet the people that are doing the shooting and the killing a lot of times are police officers. There have been 228 killed in these neighborhoods since 1999. 228 people killed by the NYPD, various others injured, so we really need to think about who needs to be stopped and frisked and that whole program. In essence, it is a quality of life issue for people of color, which makes up the majority of this city, mostly being black and Latino people. Society, the news media, Bloomberg and the 1% don’t talk about how our quality of life is affected. This is a worthy cause that we need to explore and talk about because it’s a very exploitive system in terms of Stop and Frisk and mass incarceration.
I think a world I would like to see is a just world where everybody is able to eat, where everybody is able to have a decent home, where everybody is able to have a clean environment, a world where we eradicate poverty, that if there is going to be sacrifice that it will be shared. It shouldn’t be on the backs of poor and working people. I would like to see people’s basic needs to be met – food, clothing, housing, justice. I want to see the end of imperialism, countries controlling other countries and the end of war. I know it all sounds idealistic and everything and very John Lennon “Give peace a chance,” but it’s possible. There is enough food in the world for everyone to eat. There is enough housing. Even here in New York City there are more abandoned buildings than there are homeless people. Why is that? Why do you subsidize people to be in a homeless shelter when you can put them in housing for less?
I want to see a creative energy of love that permeates this planet, where there is going to be competition that is going to be a healthy competition that makes us better people rather than a competition that makes us fight against each other or exploit each other. These are the sort of things, sharing resources, justice for Africa, justice for Latin America, places outside of Europe. There shouldn’t be this big disparity of income and wealth throughout the world.
I want to see a creative energy of love that permeates this planet, where there is going to be competition that is going to be a healthy competition that makes us better people rather than a competition that makes us fight against each other or exploit each other. These are the sort of things, sharing resources, justice for Africa, justice for Latin America, places outside of Europe. There shouldn’t be this big disparity of income and wealth throughout the world.
We have to basically create a revolution. I don’t mean that in a way that is violent or in a way that we typically think of revolution. Revolution means change, and I think that change needs to start in our hearts and our minds. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr said shortly before he passed, “We need a true revolution of values.” I think those things that I mentioned about meeting people’s basic needs, a sense of unity and love, those things will have to be exemplified in Occupy and movements like Occupy. Us creating community assemblies and community-based movements is important because a lot of the time it’s just people talking to one another that can start making the change. How we educate ourselves, the whole education system needs to change. It can’t just be about tests. Skill building is important, but how we teach people the true history of people and how we teach people about morals and values based on love, based on community, based on how we can come together.
I think that it can very much happen. I just think that we need to continually create that space, and I think that it will come. That’s why I’m encouraged about Occupy because we have created those spaces, and they still exist even though we don’t have an occupation anymore. It’s still happening. It’s still going on. It’s going to take a fight, a struggle, us being more active on social media, creating alternative media and being out there amongst the people, us continually shining the light, and I think that we do. We have to create community spaces and get out there and talk to people, so that people understand that they, not the politicians, not the corporations, are their own saviors. We are all leaders. We should all be responsible for ourselves and for each other. We need to make sure the next generation is raised in love and respected. We need to understand that this planet doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the children, and we have to create this world of love and a culture of love that includes them and respects our elders and respects everyone. I’m very hopeful.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
I think that it can very much happen. I just think that we need to continually create that space, and I think that it will come. That’s why I’m encouraged about Occupy because we have created those spaces, and they still exist even though we don’t have an occupation anymore. It’s still happening. It’s still going on. It’s going to take a fight, a struggle, us being more active on social media, creating alternative media and being out there amongst the people, us continually shining the light, and I think that we do. We have to create community spaces and get out there and talk to people, so that people understand that they, not the politicians, not the corporations, are their own saviors. We are all leaders. We should all be responsible for ourselves and for each other. We need to make sure the next generation is raised in love and respected. We need to understand that this planet doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the children, and we have to create this world of love and a culture of love that includes them and respects our elders and respects everyone. I’m very hopeful.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/