Research Essay on Occupy Wall St.

Occupy Wall Street has been called many things including: unfocused, ungrounded, and silly. Others coin it as “America’s first internet-era movement” (Rushkoff). In quintessence, Occupy Wall Street is a series of protests and demonstrations that oppose the influence that corporate greed has on American Democracy. The protestors manipulate marches and nonviolent demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with the state of American Politics and economy. This relates to the political science concepts of power, performance democracy, and protective democracy.

On September 17, 2011 hundreds of people began to gather in Zuccotti Park, New York which is Wall Street’s financial district under the banner “Occupy Wall Street”: these three simple words are causing an uproar in America (Engler). Additionally, these three words happen to be protesting the current status of America’s financial condition. With the economy in America being as terrible as it is, and the unemployment rate skyrocketing, it is absolutely necessary for some sort of change to occur. The Occupy Wall Street protesting is most positively a progressive step for the economic state in America and it is a step in the right direction.

On October 3, 2008 President George W. Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, otherwise known as the “bailout.” The Purpose of this act was defined as to, “Provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of trouble assets for the purpose of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes” (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act). In my paper I will explain and show the relationship between the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and subprime lending, the collapse of the housing market, bundled mortgage securities, liquidity, and the Government 's efforts to bailout the nation 's banks.

These losses necessitated governmental action in the financial markets. Companies such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns lost all of their stock’s value and were forced into bankruptcy. This risk spread throughout the American banks, forcing the American government to step in and buy all of the securitized, troubled assets from the balance sheets of

As I head to the streets of downtown Los Angeles in hopes of finding Ricardo Flores Magón among the sea of protestors, I practice all the questions I have written down for our interview. The presidential election is a week away so I thought what better way than to sit down with the social activist himself and get his life story. After walking through the protest for what seems like hours I finally spot Magón passing out copies of his newspaper to everyone passing by. After the crowd settles and the streets empty we find a nice quiet coffee shop to get the interview started. I begin by getting down right to the beginning and finding out just where he came from.

September 17, 2011 is the day the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City. The main issues include social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government according to The New York Times. The mix of moral foundations based on ideas from the anthropologist Richard Shweder, outline six clusters of moral concern - care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, or sanctity. OWS main moral issues include: fairness, care, and liberty. Fairness – the rich (the “1” percent) got rich by taking without giving. OWS protesters viewed the

Government help was seen as the only way to avoid a total economic collapse in the United States, although many thought it could result in a worldwide economic recession. On September 18, 2008 the 700 dollar bailout plan was proposed to congress. Fed Chairman Ben Bernake is quoted telling congress, “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday” (The Housing Market Crash of 2007, 2011). This is when it became apparent that the government had a stake in this situation. When people begin questioning whether the United States economy will still exist, the government then has a huge role in the survival of not just the economy, but the entire country. The government is in a situation where it must decide how to protect the American economy, the citizens, the businesses, and the future of the United States of America. On October 3, 2008 congress passed “Emergency Economic Stablization Act” (H.R. 1424- 110th Congress, 2008) which led to the lending of 700 billion dollars’ to

Shortly after the implementation of the original act in 1933, Senator Glass removed support for part of his own bill due to a study done in that same decade. The research concluded that securities underwritten by non-commercial banks suffered the same consequences as those wrote by commercial banks prior to 1933; thus causing unnecessary harm to an already strained market. His revision to Section 16, which prohibited commercial banks from trading in non-government securities, to once again have the ability to underwrite risky speculative securities. This amendment passed through the Senate, but was ultimately killed in the Congressional process due to a lack of support from President Roosevelt. Glass is not the only opposition the bill saw before it’s repel in 1999. Another adamant opponent to Glass-Steagall has been former President Bill Clinton. It was during this administration that Laurence H. Summers was appointed as Treasury Secretary. Summers then fought for deregulation of the financial safeguards set in place by Glass-Steagall and praised Congress when its replacement, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, shifted through. Summer’s and Clinton’s criticism, however; is not without a solid standing or reason. The G-S Act allowed banks to face tougher competition from unregulated retail and consumer stores that began to offer a line

Occupy Wall Street’s opposing expression of the disparity between the wealthy and the poor may have begun in good faith by utilizing the Freedom of Speech and General Assembly amendment rights, but the strategies some of the protestors have demonstrated are resulting in adverse reactions against themselves. The Occupy Wall Street movement will assuredly cost affected cities in the double digits of millions of dollars. Increases in payroll, overtime, and business expenses will inadvertently backfire and increase layoffs. The burden the protestors physically place on a city is weighing down an already financially stressed situation. The mass of people and their tent lifestyle is causing a drain on city finances, and alas, the money is coming

The Occupy Wall Street began in fall of 2011 in response to an email which was sent by online publication Adbusters. In this call-to-arms, those without jobs or other such responsibilities were urged to make their way to Manhattan for a long-term civil protest. The purpose of this gathering would be to decry the prevalence of corruption in the United States government, specifically as it related to Wall Street. (Economic Sociology and Political Economy)The physical movement began in a private New York City Park which was soon dubbed ‘Liberty Square ', and continued to grow until mid-November of 2011 when the protesters were forcibly evicted by the New York police. While many assumed that this would be the end of the organization, they simply moved their protest online, where they still manage to maintain a presence on the political activism scene, and have expanded to include a plethora of other socio-political causes. One of the riskiest methods utilized by the Occupy Wall Street campaign was their use of protestor-created signs and photos, rather than professional advertisements. This personalized approach often proves to be far more productive than a mere print ad. Using the classic method of Logos, Pathos, and Ethos, they succeeded in manipulating the tendency of humanity to believe anything with a statistic attached to it, as well as their emotions and desire to believe in their fellow man, which in turn created an explosive cocktail of a movement and made Occupy

Jackie DiSalvo (2015) wrote a paper called “Occupy Wall Street: Creating a Strategy for a Spontaneous Movement”. Her central claim is that Occupy Wall Street movement had the potential to grow and create military, national, class-planned, multi-issue movement that never been planned in our time before, but it was misuse by the anarchist’s influence so the social movement was a failed. She uses Mark Bray’s research and some of her own research to explain why the movement was a failed and how anarchists influence this failed movement. In her article, DiSalvo (2015) splits up her work into four sub topics which was: “Occupy Wall Street Anarchism, Occupy Wall Street Strengths, Sources of Occupy Wall Street Contradictions, and Problems with Anarchism”. She explained in each sub-topic the data that she collected and a conclusion based on this information (DiSalvo, 2015).

In 2008 two government sponsored enterprise (GSE), Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), received the second-largest bailout in the United States, totaling $187 billion. The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac drew attention to the problems with "too big to fail" (TBTF) entities and government guarantees. The bailout highlighted the lack of market discipline and encouraged moral hazard.

On a brisk September day in 2011, in the commercial district of Manhattan Island, a minute protest in Liberty Square commenced against the fiscal atrocities committed by economic establishments leading to the financial crisis and subsequent economic recession in 2007 and 2008. Over the course of the month, the movement protesting the miscarriage of justice and democracy following the economic catastrophe and the overall inequitable and unfair wealth distribution diffused to over 100 American cities as well as 1,500 cities worldwide. The revolutionary movement was named Occupy Wall Street and through occupying and protesting the symbolic location of the financial elite, Wall Street, the crusade aimed to “[revolt] against the corrosive power

There has been a debate for years on what caused the Financial Crisis in 2008 and if there was one main cause, or a series of unfortunate events that led to the crisis. The crisis began when the market was no longer funding many financial entities. The Federal Reserve then lowered the federal funds rate from 5.25% to almost zero percent in December 2008. The Federal Government realized that this was not enough and decided to bail out Bear Stearns, which inhibited JP Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns. Unfortunately Bear Stearns was not the only financial entity that needed saving, Lehman Brothers needed help as well. Lehman Brothers was twice the size of Bear Stearns and the government could not bail them out. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Lehman Brothers bankruptcy caused the market tensions to become disastrous. The Fed then had to bail out American International Group the day after Lehman Brothers failed (Poole, 2010). Some blame poor policy making and others blame the government. The main causes of the financial crisis are the deregulation of banks and bank corruption.

The effects of this bill were extreme in the financial industry. By June of 2008 the global derivatives market was worth $530 trillion while credit default swaps had grown to $55 billion. Before the financial crisis in 2007 the top banks in the credit default market were JP Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wachovia. Wachovia was purchased after it collapsed. Bank of American was