Wall St. protests: How reform happens

A street fight of sorts rumbles on this weekend in an unlikely place. The address is Wall Street, the symbolic heart of American finance. And how big the confrontation will grow is, at this point, anybody's guess. Rebecca Jarvis lays out the stakes:

"We are the 99 percent!" "Enough is enough!"

It started out as just a handful of protesters near Wall Street - the sort of demonstration folks describe as "ragtag"... "disorganized."

But over the week past, they began to find their voices.

And they began to grow in numbers.

"Wall Street got bailed out, and we all got sold out!" said one protester.

Now, three weeks and counting after the Occupy Wall Street movement first took up residence in a downtown Manhattan park, you're hearing fewer and fewer references to ragtag.

"Our mission is to change the system," said Brian Phillips, an ex-Marine. He hitchhiked from the West Coast to join a movement whose goals still remain vague.

"Mainly get the corporations out of the government," Phillips said, "and the fact that they have financial influence in all the decisions in lawmaking. It's a corrupt system."

And as the protests have grown larger, and gone viral - and gotten increasingly confrontational - more and more people have taken notice.

Thousands take Wall Street protest to N.Y.C. park
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"Occupy" protesters garner increased support

It's drawn folks like actor Mark Ruffalo: "It's a leaderless movement that really reflects the voice of the whole," he said. "We just saw a massive rip off of our tax dollars. And in a bailout, there's no ongoing investigations. No one's been brought to justice. And that is, I think, what this movement is about."

To be sure, some of it seems straight out of the Sixties, complete with songs from Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary.

... a grass-roots newspaper ...

... and a pretty basic communication system.

"Here you're not allowed to have a permit to use any sort of amplified sound," said logistics planner Craig Bethell. He said the "people's mic" - cupped hands - was "really a creative solution on how to, when one person's speaking, speak to thousands of people."

But in other ways, this protest is state-of-the-art, using the Internet to spin off demonstrations nationwide.

"What is the goal?" Jarvis asked organizer Victoria Sobel.

"That's a good question. And I will not - I cannot say that we have consensed as a group to goals, or demands or principles," Sobel said. "And that's something that as a group of people, as a group of occupiers and even broader, as a whole set of occupiers, is being discussed daily, hourly. I'm sure if we took a poll right now, there's people talking about it in this block."

When asked what he thinks was the tipping point for the protest movement, author Michael Lewis ("Boomerang") replied, "It's really hard to say when the level of pain gets to a certain point, the people are willing to take action. But what's changed is that young people, especially, have been living with years now of a bad economy, and poor employment prospects.

"We have a system right now where people in Wall Street banks can still take lots of risk - and make lots of money taking the risk - and if it goes wrong, it's probably OUR responsibility. And so, it's capitalism for us and socialism for the capitalists, I think is a fair way to describe it. The gains inside the big Wall Street firms are captured by the people who work inside the big Wall Street firms. The losses are losses that we will all suffer because they're 'too big to fail.'"

And it's the political system's failure to fix that perceived injustice that is - according to the protesters and their supporters - striking a chord ...

Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin, a liberal observer of the politics of protest, said, "Movements often begin from the margins, with people who want it all and want it now.

"The big rumble is the political and economic institutions of this country are not just 'broken,' to use the current euphemism, but they're deeply corrupted and deeply hostile to the prospects for democracy," said Gitlin. "That's the big statement. Disgust is a massive political force, when it finds a way to move."

"You now have unions coming to the table," said Michael Mulgrew, president of New York City's United Federation of Teachers. "You have community groups coming to the table. All of these people pushing together."

They joined the protest on Wednesday.

"Ninety-nine percent of the people need to be prospering, not just the top one percent," said Mulgrew. "And that's what it's going to take, everybody pushing on this. Because every community knows they're hurting, what's going on is wrong, and it's time to stop this and make a difference, and do things that allow all people to prosper."

But Wall Street does have its champions ... like Republican presidential candidate and businessman Herman Cain, who dismissed the protest on Wednesday.

"To be angry at somebody because they're successful is anti-American, in my opinion," he said.

"Why be mad, [if] you don't have a job, at the bankers and Wall Street?" Cain said. "They're the ones that helped create the jobs."

And then there are the folks who work on Wall Street ...

"I kind of of think they are misguided in their protesting, but I understand it," said Alan Valdes, who has traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for 35 years.

He says he sympathizes with the protesters.

"I definitely see their point," Valdes said. "The banks aren't loaning, that's a fact, they're just sitting on this cash. Corporate America is just sitting on TRILLIONS of dollars. So you can see their animosity. They're not getting hired. Most of them are young kids out of college, not finding jobs and not getting hired right now, so i think it's a problem. But again, I think they're misguided in blaming Wall Street. We had very little to do with it."

But no matter where the truth lies, Michael Lewis sees cause for concern ...

"Should Wall Street be worried?" asked Jarvis.

"Yes, Wall Street should be worried," he replied.

"How worried?"

"Not too yet, but they should be paying very close attention because this is how reform happens," said Lewis.

By week's end, President Obama acknowledged the growing volume of the "Occupy Wall Street" protest.

"It expresses the frustrations that the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression - huge collateral damage throughout the country, all across Main Street," Mr. Obama said. "And yet, you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place."

But for Michael Lewis, this is a fledgling movement at a crossroads ...

"You can change the world, and the world changes, and this is how it changes," Lewis said. "Now, whether this is the movement that will change the world, I can't tell you. But it does seem they have justice on their side."

And their ranks just keep on growing ...

"I think that's the point of this entire occupation," said Phillips, "is the fact that everyone has so many problems and we want them confronted. And so everyone needs to have a voice."

• occupywallstreet.org
• occupytogether.org
• We Are the 99 Percent (tumblr)
• "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World" by Michael Lewis (Norton)