The Real Reason Banks Should Worry About Occupy Wall Street

I was mildly amused by Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Oct. 3 column in The New York Times entitled, “On Wall Street, A Protest Matures.” Apparently a major bank’s CEO had asked him something like, “should we be worried about this?” Sorkin made his way into the occupied territory of Zuccotti Park to see for himself whether the rag-tag bunch of protestors posed a physical threat to his banker friend. No, it struck Sorkin, the crowd he saw didn’t seem to be of the lynching sort: “They didn’t seem like a brutal group –at least not yet” (emphasis mine).

Not yet? Was there some foretelling of a future brutal uprising? Perhaps it was the anarchist iconography (black flags, capital A’s in circles). The mainstream media would have you think anarchists are always dangerous, showing up as they do wherever the financial elites come for meet-and-greets – from the WTO in Seattle to the G-20 in London – mixing it up with the cops, hurling rocks and epithets and, when available, smashing the plate glass windows of major banks. Is the Zuccotti crowd bent on setting up guillotines outside of Goldman Sachs headquarters?

In my view, there’s no violent threat to bankers here. But a nonviolent one? Absolutely.

I bring a unique mix of perspectives to this, having participated in building takeovers at NYU and antiwar demonstrations in Washington during my student days. I’m particularly familiar with anarchists, having produced two documentary films on the movement early in my career. But, more recently, I’ve also produced financial-literacy videos for banks. And over the last few years I’ve immersed myself in the foreclosure crisis, interviewing everyone from evicted homeowners to Wall Street bond traders and mortgage servicing managers and, in the process, learning the complex and unsavory workings of this part of the financial system.

It’s important to realize that anarchism isn’t anarchy. The latter is simply a catch-all phrase used to label anything that smacks of disorder, mischief, or violence. Anarchism is a coherent, organized political and cultural philosophy that’s been fired, molded and shaped in kilns as diverse as the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco in the 1960s and, earlier on,the Spanish Civil War (when the anarchists actually ran a city, Barcelona). One of the foundations of anarchist strategy is direct action. Do what the politicians can’t or won’t do on your behalf. Form a group, confederate with other groups and get out there and “do it.” While the process of consensus-gathering – submitting everything to a vote in “general assemblies” – may be slow, tedious, messy and incomprehensible to the media, things get decided. And today discussions aren’t confined to large gatherings; Internet chat rooms and social media are part of this equation, shaping what, I believe, will be a concrete agenda, with a list of high priority-demands.

A foreclosure moratorium may top the list.

With millions of American homeowners living under a Sword of Damocles otherwise known as foreclosure, expect to see more protestors turning out to block evictions and sheriff’s sales. It happened recently in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where an 82 year old woman, about to be thrown out of her home, was supported by a phalanx of people bent on preventing this. They succeeded. This sort of activism has a history. During the Great Depression, a largely forgotten episode involved squads of radicals showing up at apartments in the Bronx where occupants and their furniture were dumped on the sidewalk. Within minutes, the displaced family – and their furniture – was moved back in.

And one hardly needs to be an anarchist to practice civil disobedience, or to object to foreclosures. Since the beginning of the crisis in 2008, law enforcement officials charged with enforcing foreclosures have, on occasion, exhibited a less than enthusiastic attitude towards throwing Granny out on the street (and several sheriffs have flat-out refused to do so).

The worsening of the housing crisis, and, by, extension, the foreclosure crisis, has provided fertile ground for strategizing opportunities for direct action. Groups need only to scan the websites for sheriff’s sales, or internet listings by so-called, legal “foreclosure mills,” to see what’s coming up on the auction block.

In short: don’t be surprised to see those black flags – and maybe even some red, white and blue ones – turn out en masse to support the next family that refuses to be extricated from their home.

Joel Sucher, a filmmaker in New York, is working on “Foreclosure Diaries,” a documentary about the financial crisis.