March on Wall Street Save Our Homes: Photos and Commentary

By Stanley W. Rogouski

Jesse Jackson is a clever stage manager. If the New York City government under its multi-billionaire mayor likes to respond to political rallies by ringing them with heavily armed troops and with metal barricades in order to demoralize their participants, to make them feel small and marginal, then Jesse Jackson knows how to make it work to his advantage. As far as rallies in New York City go, the “March on Wall Street Save Our Homes” wasn’t much, but that, in a way, was entirely the point, David come to Goliath.

Jesse Jackson is a clever stage manager. If the New York City government under its multi-billionaire mayor likes to respond to political rallies by ringing them with heavily armed troops and with metal barricades in order to demoralize their participants, to make them feel small and marginal, then Jesse Jackson knows how to make it work to his advantage. As far as rallies in New York City go, the “March on Wall Street Save Our Homes” wasn’t much, but that, in a way, was entirely the point, David come to Goliath.

Here it is, the class struggle in America laid out in its starkest form, a visual representation of the lopsided odds working class people face in post 9/11 America. On one side you have several hundred working-class African Americans come to the belly of the capitalist beast in order to confront the “powers that be” over the sub prime mortgage scam, to petition the people who really control America for a government program that would let them keep their homes. On the other side you have Wall Street in all of its grotesque, militarized glory. Masked policeman, looking more like Special Forces troops on duty in the Green Zone than like city cops, prowled the edges of the rally with automatic rifles. Haughty white men in tailored suits walked by with their noses in the air, barely stopping to take notice. Then there were the tourists, people from Europe, from Asia, from middle America, all come to see the world famous financial district, little knowing how much it has changed since 9/11 as they stood and listened to a choir sing Christmas carols on a stage under the gigantic Christmas tree, next to the armored car, alongside the maze of concrete barricades set up to stop terrorists from ramming truck bombs into the New York City Stock Exchange.

And yet, as much as Wall Street has changed physically since 9/11, in every other way, it’s still the same Wall Street that gave us the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, the Savings and Loan Scandal, and Enron. All that Jesse Jackson, Marc Morial of the National Urban League, the NAACP, Acorn, and the coalition of liberal intellectuals like Danny Schechter, anti-war activists like Leslie Cagan, and local politicians like Christine Quinn and Randy Weingarten who came to Wall Street this afternoon on December 10th want is that the government and civil society respond the way they’ve always responded, with a government program that will help minimize the latest economic and social disaster unregulated American capitalism has inflicted on the American people. “The subprime mortgage meltdown has touched millions of Americans so far - from Wall Street hedge fund employees to U.S. investors to last but not least homebuyers, a disproportionate number of them blacks and Hispanics,” Marc Morial of the National Urban League writes. “We must put a stop to this crisis before it causes major disruptions in our credit markets and economy and devastates urban communities, where subprime lending has helped millions of hard-working Americans own their own homes for the very first time and has pushed homeownership rates among minorities to historic levels”.

Indeed, when people think of the years 2000 and 2001, everybody remembers the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But very few people remember the economic attacks on the American people that took place in the form of the artificially Enron manipulated energy crisis in California, the collapse of the tech stock bubble, the redistribution of income up the economic ladder in the form of Bush’s tax cuts and war on Iraq, and what is now widely recognized to be the approaching economic disaster of the sub prime mortgage bubble. As speaker after speaker made clear, if your neighbor loses his home, the value of your home goes down. If your neighbors have to sell their houses at a loss, then your tax burden goes up and your access to social services goes down. And if many Americans are tempted to blame the victims of the subprime mortgage scam, it’s also clear that the predatory lending institutions bear the true responsibility. As Danny Schechter on his “news dissector” blog writes “the debate over whether the blame for the crisis should rest with lenders or borrowers misses a crucial point: if lenders couldn’t offset their loans to Wall Street, their practices couldn’t have spiraled out of control”.

As I walked home from the New Jersey Transit Station in Cranford New Jersey, 20 miles outside of Manhattan, the crisis that the Rally on Wall Street Save Our Homes addressed came into stark reality. One out of every four or five houses seems to have a “For Sale” sign on its lawn. The two huge MacMansions alongside of the Garden State Parkway built during the loose credit following 9/11 will probably sit there for years without being sold. Furniture stores all over the county seem to be having “Going out of Business” sales. The biggest house in my neighborhood has been padlocked by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Real estate agents desperate for a commission don’t look too closely at credit records.

And yet for all of that, this still isn’t a bad place to live. Even 20 years ago, it was racially segregated. Now it’s not. Whites, Asians, blacks, Hispanics, Orthodox Jews, East European immigrants, Indians all live together in a reasonable state of tolerance and respect. The crime rate is low. Violent crime is rare. Even the houses with “for sale” signs seem neat and well kept.

But all of this could change rapidly if people start losing their houses and the economy goes into a recession. The same level of in your face militarizatization and coercion that you see every day on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street might just reach Main Street.

And that’s something I hope I don’t have to see.

By Stanley W. Rogouski stanleyrogouski@yahoo.com