00:09:31.520Meanwhile, the nine banks that received the most help from the massive taxpayer bailout
00:09:36.540gave 5,000 employees bonuses of at least $1 million each.
00:09:41.680In the aftermath of the crash, a lot of young people either could not afford college
00:09:46.800or were graduating with crushing student loan debt.
00:09:49.660They were entering the workforce in the middle of a deep recession, and their ability to launch a career or repay their loans or buy their first home, well, all of that had essentially been put on pause for who knows how long.
00:10:05.200To put it another way, what COVID lockdowns were to Gen Z, the 2008 financial crash was to millennials.
00:10:11.780I want to introduce you to three people who were in their teens or early 20s
00:11:30.160Then there's Sandy Nurse. She was born in Panama to two Navy sailors, a white American mother and a black Panamanian father.
00:11:39.720I started as a kid who was a part of a U.S. military occupying force, the mission of which is to exploit people, land and resources for the benefit of the United States of America.
00:11:52.680And I spent a lot of time, almost my entire childhood, moving around the world and seeing the reactions to that, the consequences of that.
00:12:04.100She went to college in the U.S. where she graduated with a poli-sci degree and an incredible amount of student loan debt.
00:12:11.680And in 2011, she'd begun what seemed like a promising career in humanitarian aid.
00:12:16.720I was just coming off of a United Nations World Food Program in Haiti.
00:12:23.500I was visiting different cities and villages to write these reports about the distribution of food aid.
00:12:30.440At the time of the earthquake, all food systems collapsed in Haiti.
00:12:35.780So she's a do-gooder, trying to help Haitians in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left many more homeless.
00:12:44.980Except the way that the U.N. food program was helping just feels wrong.
00:12:51.800The U.N. was paying Haitians who had just been through a traumatic natural disaster in food or low wages in exchange for hard labor.0.98
00:13:00.180The thing that really just kind of snapped for me and essentially just broke my heart was seeing on this mountainside these old Haitian women in their flip flops carrying these boulders to make these walls.0.98
00:14:34.520I grew up in central Ohio, in a small town that kind of became a suburb.
00:14:41.920And my parents had been involved in, like, Democratic Party politics mostly.
00:14:48.420I mean, they definitely talked about politics, like, constantly.
00:14:53.820Her dad was actually a labor lawyer for a time.
00:14:57.040I was in high school when 9-11 happened.
00:15:02.220Terrorists declare war on the United States, hijacking jet miners, crashing them into New York's World Trade Towers.
00:15:08.800President George W. Bush made the call to enter into a war that would end up expanding and lasting 20 years.
00:15:16.260On my orders, coalition forces have begun to select the targets of military.
00:15:20.460I learned about, you know, politics and how power works and how to organize first, you know, from my parents and then became more radicalized in the context.
00:18:42.560It was an incredibly demoralizing experience to protest in the aughts.
00:18:47.860I mean, typically what would happen is the cops would kettle you, which means that they would sort of wrap your protests in this orange netting and haul you off to jail.
00:18:55.400Or they'd say, stay in this little tiny free speech pen.
00:18:58.980If there was political energy, it was online.
00:19:01.660There was this kind of prankster, disruptive spirit on the Internet.
00:19:06.940And that is where the spark that ignited Occupy came from.
00:20:10.780Below it, hashtag Occupy Wall Street, September 17th, Bring Tent.
00:20:17.640The email with this image came from Adbusters, an activist magazine that liked to stir up trouble.
00:20:24.400It was known for its beautifully designed spoof ads critiquing consumer culture.
00:20:29.040Adbusters regularly instigated boycotts and encouraged people to artfully vandalize billboards.
00:20:35.540And now, their Occupy Wall Street image and hashtag was ripping through the Internet.
00:20:41.380One of the groups that promoted this idea to Occupy Wall Street was Anonymous,
00:20:45.860the hacktivist collective that had gained notoriety for launching cyberattacks against corporations and the Church of Scientology.
00:20:52.540Anonymous announced that they were taking to the streets and urged people to join them.
00:20:56.880Hello, citizens of the Internet. We are Anonymous.
00:21:00.040On September 17th, Anonymous will flood into Lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices. We want freedom. This is a nonviolent protest. We do not encourage violence in any way. The abuse and corruption of corporations, banks and governments, ends here. Join us.
00:21:28.140We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Wall Street. Expect us.
00:21:40.640The editors at AdBusters had made it clear that they only wanted to instigate, not organize.
00:21:46.720And certainly, Anonymous wasn't used to IRL actions.
00:21:50.880For Marissa's group of anarchists, the New York City General Assembly,
00:21:53.980it was like they'd been given a save-the-date for a party they'd been thinking about throwing,
00:22:38.640From Washington, D.C., to Connecticut, to Wisconsin, and all over the country, thousands of people came out to protest government spending.
00:22:46.680The Tea Party got off the ground in 2009.
00:22:54.760The Tea Party movement was a right-wing populist uprising.
00:22:58.320They protested both the bank bailouts and government efforts to help distressed homeowners and unemployed people,
00:23:05.340which they viewed as government handouts to undeserving poor people.
00:23:10.500And so they showed up en masse on tax day to protest government spending.
00:23:15.800Over half a million people across the country attended these tax day protests.
00:23:19.940People were angry about the bank bailouts.
00:24:10.120But the fact that there was crickets on our side after this incredible, incredible betrayal of the country by these bankers and by the politicians of both parties who are bailing them out and leaving people to suffer.
00:24:25.780It just felt like, well, we have to do something. And that was enough of a motivation to get me to show up at something that I wasn't particularly optimistic about.
00:24:34.600Perhaps it was only because Occupy was kind of the only game in town.
00:24:39.220But our cynics, Sandy and Alini, that I introduced to you earlier, were curious.
00:24:43.740I had been following online a little bit, and one of my best friends,
00:24:47.900both of us were kind of these gloom and doom, disillusioned, apathetic, hate political culture.
00:26:53.680But I just looked around and was like, yeah, I'm going to be here for like an hour.
00:26:58.300Eventually, the festival part of it all that Nalini really wasn't feeling
00:27:02.060transitioned into something deeper and more personal.
00:27:05.900For the afternoon, people were having small group conversations
00:27:09.320on questions that we had come up with in the New York City General Assembly.
00:27:13.800And those questions were loosely like, what world do you want to live in?
00:27:19.700What's happening right now with the economic crisis?
00:27:22.820How do we get from where we are now to this world that we want to live in?
00:27:27.060Astra arrived in time for the small group conversations.
00:27:30.800What was so striking to me and caught my imagination out of the gate was that instead of standing there and chanting, which would have been a kind of conventional thing to do.
00:27:40.900I mean, that's what protesters usually do.
00:27:42.280We were all told to sit in small circles with our neighbors.
00:27:46.600And so we immediately organized ourselves into these mini assemblies, groups of maybe a dozen to 15 people.
00:27:55.580And that already felt like such a break with the usual script, because instead of standing sort of outside the New York Stock Exchange and saying, you know, you suck and shouting at it,0.98
00:28:08.440we were actually building bonds with each other.0.96
00:28:44.860She'd been carrying the shame of the empty fridge, the eviction notice, her lack of college education,0.66
00:28:51.660the lie to her employer that she hadn't been able to afford the college education she'd put on her resume.
00:28:57.680She was suddenly hearing stories just like hers from other people.
00:29:01.980What shifted for me was that general assembly that first night and people getting up and telling their stories.
00:29:08.700At first, people told their stories in these small groups.
00:29:12.280And then the whole crowd, estimated to be almost 1,000 people, was brought together for a general assembly.
00:29:19.180In anarchist fashion, there was no leader, just a facilitation team that invited everyone to take turns speaking.
00:29:26.420I remember somebody saying that their parents' home got foreclosed upon.
00:29:29.400I remember hearing somebody just said, I went to all this college and have all this debt.
00:29:33.760And, like, we were all told we had to go to college to get a better job.
00:29:36.940And somebody was like, and I'm working at Starbucks.
00:29:38.460Not that it's like, you know, solidarity with the Starbucks Workers Union, but like that wasn't what we were told you go to college for, right?
00:29:46.600There was a building sense of connection of no.
00:29:49.440It wasn't just you or your bad choices that put you in debt.
00:30:56.400But that moment I sat down after I spoke.
00:30:59.280And I was like, whatever's happening, I like it.
00:31:02.340And I'm going to do what needs to be done.
00:31:06.400That moment of cynicism turning to optimism was happening for other people at the park, too, including Sandy, who had arrived with friends.
00:31:14.720I can't explain exactly why I stayed. I just know that we went down, we went for this little march, and then we hung out in the park and participated in these breakout group conversations.
00:31:27.560Of course, the powers that be wanted them out of the park.
00:31:31.560In the spirit of direct democracy, their decision to stay or go was up to the group as a whole.
00:31:37.120So, Marissa took a bullhorn to make an announcement.
00:31:39.820It's a really amazing process of direct democracy.
00:31:44.780But we recognize that this is a specific group, a gathering that we have here.
00:31:49.280And we want to hear from people here to see how we can proceed tonight.
00:31:53.400So one of our first orders of business is, you know, are we going to stay or not?
00:31:59.600She passed the bullhorn to someone else from the facilitation team.
00:32:02.720I'm here with some logistical information.
00:32:05.160This square is technically a privately owned square.
00:32:10.700We have been in contact with the property owner
00:32:20.160who has told us that his intention is to not allow people to sleep in this park tonight.
00:37:12.020They were trying to create an anarchist, anti-capitalist utopia inside that tiny park.
00:37:17.040And against all odds, people across the United States set up their own occupations
00:37:22.040and copied what the radicals in New York City were doing.
00:37:25.600In this way, Zuccotti Park became a testing ground for a set of ideals that the organizers had arrived with.
00:37:32.500Leaderlessness, radical inclusivity, direct democracy.
00:37:37.320At the beginning, it wasn't at all clear if any of it would work.
00:37:41.840What happens when a movement has no leader?
00:37:43.740Does radical inclusivity make it stronger or more chaotic?
00:37:48.040And if change must come from outside the system, how do you build something powerful enough not just to resist injustice, but to replace it?
00:38:00.040Coming up on the next five episodes of Occupy, an unfinished uprising.
00:38:05.380Occupy Wall Street, it was a really exciting and enlivening and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck.
00:38:16.920The NYPD would pick people up on the street for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something.
00:38:24.080They would drop them off in the park and say, you need a hot meal, you need a blanket, you need a coat, go down to Zuccotti Park.
00:38:29.860and the escalation of police activity was like really really wild out of nowhere that's that's
00:38:40.460when we were sprayed occupy it was a physical space where people put their values into practice
00:38:47.340and that's not something that we see very often i wish something like it would happen again