Video Archives - Roundtable Discussion on Occupy Wall Street (2011)
10-30-2014Wednesday, October 12, 2011: Roundtable Discussion on Occupy Wall Street
Participants:
-- Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College.
-- Paul Mariental, Director of the Bard TLS Program.
-- Jennifer Derr, a former professor in the History and Middle Eastern Studies programs at Bard College.
-- Steven Maslow, a banker on Wall Street and an avid supporter of the Hannah Arendt Center.
-- Two Bard Students who have been involved in the OWS demonstrations.
On October 12th, 2011, the Arendt Center hosted a roundtable discussion on the Occupy Wall Street movement with Bard faculty, Bard students who participated in the protests, and representatives of Wall Street.
As both a student of Arendt’s writing—he studied with her biographer—and an insider on Wall Street, Steven Maslow offers a highly informed perspective on the Occupy movement’s rise to national prominence. “We have a hyperconcentration of income…[the severity of which] the protestors actually understate,” he says, pointing out that it is really more like the 0.1%, not the 1%, who hold super-privileged positions in our economy.
He also offers insight into the attitudes of his fellow financiers. When asked by an audience member how financial businessmen are receiving Occupy, Maslow paraphrases Freud and states that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Wall Street, he says, is indifferent. Bankers and corporate lawyers do not have Occupy on their minds because they do not take it seriously.
[caption id="attachment_14727" align="aligncenter" width="549"]
NYPD standing guard in Zuccotti Park, 2011. (Source: Esquire)[/caption]
Towards that end, Roger Berkowitz reminds the audience that all Occupy has accomplished is the takeover of a couple of parks in Manhattan. The movement has not achieved more because, in his mind, it suffers from a lack of wide appeal, focusing on esoteric concerns, such as the creation of a direct democracy, rather than more tenable issues, such as the regulation of banks.
Acknowledging these shortcomings, Berkowitz concludes that Occupy will not be taken seriously until it poses a real threat to established power. Wall Street simply doesn’t consider Occupy to pose any serious hazard to the status quo. If Occupy is going to accomplish anything of substance, it will have to impress upon the financial world that it means business.
This talk is an artifact of recent history. For anyone still concerned with what has become of Occupy, it is a useful look back into the movement’s beginning, not to mention a helpful starting point to assess what has changed about Occupy, or what has not, in the intervening time.
Analysis by Dan Perlman
You can view the entire roundtable discussion below.
Occupy Wall Street Roundtable Discussion from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.
(Featured Image: Occupy Wall Street protesters rally in a small park on Canal Street in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011; Source: Current.org)