By Liz Gold, for Planet Waves
“The bailout is bullshit. We’re going to stop it.”
“The bailout is bullshit. You broke it, you bought it.”
“No bail! Send them to jail!”
These were the chants heard over and over again as protesters infiltrated the Stock Exchange Thursday in Manhattan’s financial district. These rallying cries were urgent, guttural, angry and directed at President Bush’s plan to spend upwards of $700 billion to make up for the disastrous Wall Street shakedown.
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Protester in New York’s financial district Thursday afternoon. Photo by Liz Gold.
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The proposal, announced by the president Wednesday evening, would allow the treasury to buy troubled assets with the hope of restoring confidence to the credit markets. On Thursday, Democrats and Republicans battled it out in Washington D.C. in an effort to come up with a nonpartisan counterproposal. Instead, they are at a standstill unable to agree on what needs to be done revealing their divisiveness – even in the face of a profound crisis that affects all American people.
Needless to say, people are pissed.
“I’m here because I’m furious that the government is considering giving $700 billion to financial companies,” said Hannah from Queens. “Is there money for healthcare? No. Is there money for education? No. But there is a trillion dollars for multi-million companies? It’s crazy.”
The protest was a call to self-organize set forth by Arun Gupta, a journalist at the Indypendent newspaper, who sent an e-mail to friends and colleagues earlier in the week that quickly circulated the web and sparked the rally downtown. People brought personal trash and junk to illustrate Wall Street’s now worthless assets. The pile, appropriately enough, was stacked on the ground by the famous Bull of Wall Street’s back end, aka its balls.
“This is the financial equivalent of September 11,” Gupta wrote in his e-mail. “They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the вЂ?therapy’, and we’ll just roll over!”