Courtesy of Pam Martens
Protester Wears a Swamp Creature Costume Outside Goldman Sachs Headquarters, January 17, 2017
Sometimes all it takes to win a war is a rallying cry. That cry started in the bowels of Wall Street on September 17, 2011 with the takeover of Zuccotti Park by grassroots protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street. The thunder clap from that movement, “we are the 99 percent,” reverberated around the world. Occupy focused the public’s attention on the insidious wealth transfer system that has been institutionalized by Wall Street on behalf of the 1 percent – a system which has minted dozens of billionaires and thousands of multi-millionaires while collapsing the U.S. economy from 2008 to 2010 and leaving millions of Americans homeless and jobless. (See our past coverage of Occupy in related articles below.)
Yesterday, green shoots from the Occupy movement sprouted in a light falling rain outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs at 200 West Street in Manhattan – a building also built on the backs of taxpayers. (See Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters in Tax-Funded Center.) Dozens of protesters from New York Communities for Change and supporting organizations turned out with signs and sleeping bags to set up an encampment to last through Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday. The rallying cry yesterday was “Government Sachs.”
Chants targeting Goldman echoed through the crowd: “Goldman, Goldman you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side”; “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Government Sachs has got to go”; and “Hey Sachs, get off it, put people over profit.” Some protesters wore garish swamp creature masks to taunt Donald Trump over his campaign promises.
Jonathan Westin, Director, New York Communities for Change, Speaks at Goldman Sachs Protest on January 17, 2017
Using the same “mic check” system that was popularized by Occupy Wall Street, Jonathan Westin, Director of New York Communities for Change, explained the point of the protest. Westin told the crowd that the President-elect, Donald Trump, had run on a platform to drain the swamp. Instead, said Westin, Goldman Sachs, “the same people who crashed this economy” would be moving from “just lobbying from the outside” to “control our government. They will control Treasury; they will control the SEC; and they will control Donald Trump, unless we stop them.”
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