By Sarah Lai Stirland
An e-mail that began as a rallying cry from a lone journalist to an influential circle of friends to protest the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street has ignited a national day of street protests. Some demonstrators plan to dump their rubbish in front of the bronze bull sculpture near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan Thursday.
"People are going to bring their own personal junk that they think is worth as much as the junk financial instruments that the government is proposing to buy from the Wall Street banks," says Andrew Boyd, an activist and freelance online-video artist for nonprofit groups in Manhattan. "We're hoping that people show up with their 8-track cassette collections, their old Spice Girl CDs, their surf boards that got bit by sharks and old Enron stock certificates."
Boyd is just one of thousands of Americans from all over the political spectrum who the Bush Administration has angered with its vague proposal to hand $700 billion over to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to restore U.S. financial markets' health. That anger has manifested itself online through e-mail, web sites and other online chatter, with one site, BuyMyShitPile.com, going rapidly viral this week. The site, a parody of the dire financial situation, is what is inspiring the self-organizing group of activists to show up in downtown Manhattan Thursday evening with all their junk. They hope to make their simmering fury palpable to Wall Streeters getting off work.
"Why should people who made financially imprudent decisions be rewarded?" asks Boyd, who is best known for founding the political protest theater group Billionaires For Bush. "It's our hard-earned tax dollars, and we're being asked to bail these guys out at the same time as this locks out all the things that we want for the future."
Boyd's is one of many voices of frustration. Other people's anger spilled out online, which in turn, is fueling the planned protests' momentum.
Arun Gupta, a 43-year-old freelance journalist in Manhattan, is someone else who was so upset by unfolding events that he was moved to action.
"I've been spending a lot of time reading about the intensifying crisis and the bailout plan," he says. "The more I read, the more outraged and flabbergasted I was: It became clear to me that this was the financial equivalent of the Sept. 11 attacks."
He was so upset that he banged out a passionately worded 629-word e-mail on his laptop Sunday afternoon urging his friends -- and anyone else who would listen -- to show up at the southern tip of Manhattan late Thursday afternoon to demonstrate. He says that he's never organized a protest before in his life.
"This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate, to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place," he wrote. "This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the “therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!"
He added:
Think about it: They said providing health care for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.
This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4 pm in Wall Street (see below).
The e-mail ricocheted through the electronic ecosystem faster than the implosion of Wall Street itself, tapping into and riding the frisson of resentment among Americans at this monumental financial foul-up.
"I wrote up an e-mail Sunday night, and I sat on it." he says. "I was a bit hesitant because I'm not an organizer, I'm a journalist, but I also think that things have to be done in the world."
He said that he sent it out to best-selling author Naomi Klein, who posted it to her website, and sent it out to her e-mail list. Then TrueMajority, a 700,000 member activist group headed by Ben and Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen, sent out an action alert the next day.
TrueMajority is making a "protest kit" available on its web site with instructions for groups who are interested on how to organize a rally. One of the instructions is to bring cell phones to the protest, and to have protesters simultaneously call their members of Congress. The site has also put up a web page that enables people to find an event near them by ZIP code.
"This was a convergence of everyone having the same thought at the same time," says Matt Holland, TrueMajority's online director.
He says everybody he knew had received Gupta's e-mail at least three times from different people. It's also been widely circulated on blogs.
Holland says that Gupta's language just taps into "the strength of the emotion" that many Americans are feeling right now. TrueMajority's members themselves have made 20,000 phone calls to Congress, he says. Members report the calls that they made through the group's website.
"Everybody is just incredibly pissed off about this, and if there is a place and time for them to express themselves, they're going to do it," he says.
Congressional lawmakers have expressed frustration and skepticism over Treasury's proposal, although they won a concession about CEO pay Wednesday afternoon. President Bush is scheduled to address the nation about the bailout plan 9 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, and John McCain has asked Barack Obama to agree to cancel Friday's presidential debate so that they could both work with the administration to hammer out an agreement.
In the meantime, a proposal to add several restrictions on the package from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has gained traction online. He's asked Americans to sign onto the petition, and he intends to present it to Paulson. The senator's office reported Wednesday that 8,000 people signed the petition within the first 24 hours. Another sign that the petition gained widespread notice: "Bernie Sanders," was one of the most-searched-for terms on Google Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, a long list of economists from the nation's top universities sent a letter to congressional leaders voicing their concerns about the too-speedy passage of any bailout package.
They said that they were most concerned about the plan's fundamental fairness and its ambiguity.
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