Inside the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street, and why even its organizers won't say it worked

That image - which first graced the cover of the July 2011 issue of a small bimonthly magazine called Adbusters - served as the initial call to action for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The computer-hacking group Anonymous spread the word online, and on September 17, protesters took over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan - where they would stay until they were evicted by police two months later.

The movement erupted just a few short years after the global financial crisis. The banks and lenders that had inflated the mortgage bubble received multibillion-dollar bailouts from the government, while homeowners faced foreclosure in record numbers. Coining the slogan, "We are the 99%," Occupy Wall Street decried income inequality, saying that the wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled far too much of the nation's wealth and that corporations wielded too much influence over American democracy.

Ten years later, income inequality is as acute as ever. Wall Street still holds sway in Washington, banks are minting record profits, and corporations pay starkly lower taxes than they did then. If Occupy Wall Street had any impact on the yawning gap between the 1% and the 99%, it isn't easy to discern.

On the 10th anniversary of the occupation, Insider spoke with a host of Occupy participants and observers of the movement, including the original organizers, city officials, historians, Wall Street traders, and lawyers on both sides of the battle. We wanted to understand how Occupy started, what it meant to those involved, and what legacy it could claim.

Most of those we spoke with acknowledged that Occupy sparked a global conversation about wealth inequality that continues to this day and helped fuel the political rise of democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But they also said the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots had intensified since Occupy, which raises questions about whether the movement can claim success.

"In terms of things people cared about, it certainly doesn't seem to be going well. We have this global pandemic and billionaires getting so much richer," said Elena Cohen, the president of the National Lawyers Guild and a participant of the occupation. "That said, I think people in Occupy Wall Street would be happy that the legacy mattered and lasted and the connections and work went forward. There was this movement to make Occupy Wall Street some kind of joke, but it was really powerful."

The planning

Kalle Lasn, one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street: At that time, young people weren't very happy. They graduated from university, and the future didn't look that bright - they're not going to have a life as good as their parents. The moment really felt right for some sort of "big bang" to happen. In our brainstorming sessions, we figured that we needed to do something audacious. We had this idea: Why don't we go to the very heart of global capitalism in Wall Street? And why don't we sort of occupy that place and see if we can do something?

Anthony Dassaro, former foreign exchange salesperson for Brown Brothers Harriman: It was just a very difficult, uncertain time. We had the financial crisis, Bear Stearns going bankrupt, takeover rumors all over the place. Big swings in the markets. And then you started having outright robbery, guys like Bernie Madoff.

Lasn: In the upcoming issues of Adbusters, we came up with that ballerina on the poster, and we started putting out these tactical briefings. The internet went a little crazy, and all of a sudden, people started tweeting about it. The hashtag #OccupyWallStreet - we came up with that. Suddenly, we sort of woke up to the fact that we were onto something really big.

Marisa Holmes, organizer with New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts: I saw it originally on the Bloombergville discussion list. There was this suspicion of Adbusters because they weren't here - they weren't local. We managed to pull together this New York general assembly that met throughout the summer. I facilitated every one of these general assemblies to be as prepared as possible for whatever was going to happen on the 17th. I'd say on average, probably 40 or 50 people attended. They were every Saturday, like late afternoon, at Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side under the Hare Krishna tree. Not because we're Hare Krishna supporters or anything. It's just a very beautiful spot, shade in the hot summer heat.

Akshat Tewary, lawyer and activist with Occupy the SEC working group: One of the interesting things about Occupy was there was a debate very early on at the general-assembly meetings about what Occupy wanted. That was the rhetoric and the narrative in the media as well. Like, "What did these guys want?" In response to that, some people were saying we should utilize this movement and maybe create a political party, like the Tea Party at the time, or come up with specific demands. Others were saying, "No, we are not the Tea Party. We don't want to be co-opted by the Democratic Party or any of these figureheads."

Gideon Oliver, civil-rights lawyer and former leader of the National Lawyers Guild: There were efforts along the way to try to find spaces for people to occupy together, where they could do so, hopefully, without getting evicted by the cops. Eventually, organizers hit on the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park. It's not a city park - it's a privately owned public space. There are regulations that prohibit them from closing it except under certain circumstances, like when they have to clean it, which is a loophole they eventually ended up using to justify the eviction.

Holmes: It's a nice place to sit. There are trees, and there are places where you can plug in your phone. It's all wired. It's really an ideal space to have an occupation. But I don't think the owners or the city intended it that way. They didn't have a protocol in place because no one had tried to occupy a privately owned park before.

The occupation

Sam Cohen, who served as a lawyer for the movement: On September 17, when things kicked off, I was just coming back from my honeymoon - I had gotten married a week before. Wylie Stecklow, the attorney I was working with, was there on the first day. For a very short time, Wylie and I were retained as representing the general assembly. I still have a copy of the retainer in my files. Wylie told me that I had to shake off the jet lag and get down there as soon as possible. I was really struck by what was going on there - particularly by how orderly, well-mannered and just pleasant it was. There were a few Wall Street types who would come by the occupation and heckle, but they were pretty few.

Over the following days, as the protest grew, an entire community began to develop, complete with a library, a kitchen, a newspaper, and working groups to tackle specific tasks and causes.

Holmes: Around 8 or 9 each morning, people would start to wake up. You'd see people stretching, doing yoga, or just talking, having coffee. There was always plenty of coffee to keep us awake. People were donating coffee to us. It kind of just materialized through the food committee, which later became the kitchen.

Cohen: On my first trip down there, someone approached me with a tray of Ben & Jerry's and offered me an ice cream. A lot of the restaurants were donating food to the occupiers. There was also a phenomenon of people ordering pizzas via credit card to be delivered to the park. So in the early days, there was a lot of really good food showing up. I had worked with a lot of protests before. I'd never worked a catered one. It made a very favorable impression.

Holmes: Each morning, we would have a meeting among people who were part of working groups to talk about logistics for what needed to happen that day - if we needed to get tents or sleeping bags or more food or whatever. Then there would be a march, depending on how early people woke up, for the opening bell at the stock exchange. The direct-action group would gather people together and start chanting, "Banks got bailed out. We got sold out. All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street." They would march down Broadway and turn on to Wall Street and circle around the stock exchange, banging pots and pans and various noisemakers. Maybe a dance party would unfold.

Peter-Christian Aigner, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York: There were folks hanging around the periphery who were gawking, and conversations happening around the edge. I remember there were these booksellers there. But the main show, as it were, was the conversations happening in the square.

Holmes: At 1 o'clock, we would have our first general assembly of the day. People would come and give testimony. Maybe they lost their job. Maybe they had all these student loans they couldn't pay. Maybe they lost their house in foreclosure. People were there to hear them and to encourage them and to provide food. That's really what the space was for, ultimately: for people to air all of these grievances and to be heard and to feel supported.

We'd do another march on Wall Street for the closing bell, and then we'd have an evening assembly from 7 until whenever. Lots of musicians came. There was the drumming circle, and people would come and tell jokes. There was a kind of open-mic situation. People would identify a need and then create whatever could fulfill that need. There was a library, and a medic station, and a list of vets in the area who were willing to donate their time. There was this open invitation to create a new society and an understanding that everyone is part of that society and has something to contribute.

With PA systems forbidden and the protest having grown too large for megaphones, the occupiers developed a call-and-response system called the people's microphone. A speaker would yell out a phrase, and those nearby would repeat it in unison, ensuring the message would be heard throughout the park. The protesters also used a system of hand signals as part of the consensus-driven decision-making process.

Holmes: It came from the streets of the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. They used it as a way to communicate between the different blockades that were happening while the WTO was in session. There's often a narrative about people's mic that it was because the police took away our megaphones. But actually it just wasn't practical, in the moment, to rig multiple megaphones together. And the sound is terrible. There's usually this screeching sound associated with megaphones.

Aigner: I remember observing the famous - infamous - hand gestures, when they were debating. It all seemed very earnest and peaceable.

Vlad Teichberg, former derivatives trader for big banks who helped organize Occupy: In terms of most elating moments, it was probably those first few general assemblies. We actually were able to create this vision that people's voices count. That was the big idea behind Occupy, in the end. It wasn't stated, but it was in the way it was done. It was a fundamental message that every person counts.

Cas Holloway, New York City's deputy mayor of operations: At the beginning, it didn't overwhelm the park. It was fairly coherent. My recollection of the feeling, the attitude, was that it was peaceful. It was, in terms of its origins, a classic protest.

Occupy quickly spawned sister protests in other cities in the US and in dozens of other countries. As the movement gained steam, media coverage intensified, with front-page coverage in The New York Times and broadcast reporters from national news networks descending on the scene. The protest at Zuccotti Park continued to grow, attracting celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin.

Tewary: Naomi Klein, she was coming down there a lot. Joseph Stiglitz was coming.

Dassaro: Russell Simmons, I remember, was down there giving motivational speeches.

Hilary Goodfriend, graduate student: I got to see Naomi Klein. That was pretty neat. Arundhati Roy, that was definitely the most thrilling intervention I can remember. I think she spoke at Judson, at the church off Washington Square.

Holmes: Very quickly, we went from a dozen or so working groups to over a hundred, and like 4,000 active members of Occupy Wall Street. Plus tens of thousands of people supporting us in demonstrations, and over a thousand other Occupy camps around the world. There was a real-time communication with those camps, trying to build out infrastructure and share whatever knowledge we had learned. It was incredible. I mean, I've never before or since seen such a high level of organization in such a short amount of time.

Tewary: There was a group of organizers that were kind of setting the agenda and the timing and that kind of thing. Those were maybe 10 people or so. But consistent with a nonhierarchical approach, they were opening it up to other people. Anyone could suggest an idea. It's really tough. It's like herding cattle because you can have just someone off the streets coming and yelling gibberish.

Teichberg: We created this huge supergroup of people who were doing media for Occupies around the world. We cross-amplified various information, but we did it through a chat room. We'd retweet something that happened in Portland, Oregon, and then the whole world of Occupy accounts would retweet it. By 2014, that was hitting about 35 million people worldwide.

The deterioration

Cohen: They arrested like 600 people on the Brooklyn Bridge and held them on the bridge for hours. The police had blocked the bridge and cleared the roadway, so it seemed like the protesters were being led on to the bridge. It felt like a trap.

Dassaro: Having our office across the street from the park, at Brown Brothers Harriman, you knew to avoid it. But you'd step out to get a bite to eat, and you'd see stuff. The park started to smell in a bad way. It was becoming very dirty. None of the street vendors would go near the park. They didn't want to deal with the harassment: "Can you spare a cup of coffee? Can you spare some food?" Their customers didn't want to bother going to those places, either - they didn't know if they were going to get accosted by some of the protesters.

Holloway: I was working very closely with the police department and the fire department at the time. From our perspective, public safety was first and foremost what we were focused on. Over time, it became quite a large encampment. If people are going to express themselves - and there's a proud tradition of that in New York City - you need to be able to access sites and get to people that might need help.

Dassaro: A lot of people did not like it. It's not like it was a one day or two day thing. The thing was there for months. So you just learned to avoid it. Maybe it's just being a cynical New Yorker, but once you identify a problem spot, you avoid it.

Rick Lehmann, lawyer for the park's owner, Brookfield Properties: I've never been an opponent of dissent, but this Occupy Wall Street thing - I remember walking by the site and being accosted by people. People were camping out and lighting fires in the park. It's a very small park. It was dangerous. There were too many people there. There was no sanitation. It was a health hazard. They were blocking people from walking through the park. It was not organized - it was purposefully not organized - and it kind of mushroomed. I went to college in the late '60s. I went to a number of protests, and they were better organized than that.

Cohen: Towards the end of the occupation, there were a couple of instances of sexual assault that occurred. Dealing with that in such a small community was very painful. There were people who came there feeling like they could trust being there who felt violated.

Holmes: The 99% includes a lot of poor, forgotten people. That's who we're talking about when we're talking about the 99%. The question is how to hear everyone's voices - how to build an inclusive movement, while also protecting ourselves against the disruptions.

Teichberg: They actually weren't that equal in the end. People who had amazing degrees from, like, Harvard were definitely at an advantage in the assembly system because they could speak in a more educated way. It was also an issue of time: People who were poor can't do six hours of assembly and stuff like that. When it came to inequality, Occupy was too naive because they didn't take into account that the society we're in was so unequal to begin with.

Cohen: In activism on the left, there are aspirational tendencies of inclusivity that can often become a bit of a - I'm looking for a more polite word than "pissing contest." People bicker about who is more pure. And Occupy certainly had some activists who were disruptive in their calls for greater inclusivity. A lot of the best tendencies of critical interrogation of privilege were present in Occupy. And frankly, there were also a bunch of very sanctimonious white male activists in love with the sound of their own voices.

Holloway: In the end, there certainly wasn't unity among all the people there. But it also had become a very large and dangerous encampment. From an operations perspective, it just grew from what was initially purely focused on, "We have something to say, and this is how we're going to say it," into something else altogether that took on a life of its own and became much more of a public-safety and quality-of-life challenge.

Teichberg: By the time you got to November, it was hugely problematic as an occupation. I don't think this idea was designed for a full-time, super-long-term occupation because you end up attracting all kinds of fundamental social problems. The problems that plague society, big ones - people with psychological issues begin showing up in the camp. Also, what was hugely problematic was the money. All these donations started coming into Zuccotti, into OWS. Eventually, the general assembly that was supposed to determine how this protest goes becomes a general assembly attached to a pot of money. All they debated was how to spend it. So it subverted itself, on some level.

Holmes: When we started, we had no money. There wasn't a bank account. Most food, we got donated. But we set up a link. Initially, it had like $800, and that paid for mostly bread and peanut butter. We did a lot with very few resources in the early days. When we had nothing, people were much nicer to each other. But then, when we had money all of a sudden, there was a discussion of maybe renting a space instead of occupying the space. The whole ethos changes. Instead of doing it as this whole volunteer scrappy occupation, it becomes institutionalized. And with the institutionalization, people become more competitive. The culture is different.

Holloway: Overall, it ultimately did become a serious public-safety concern. But it wasn't about people being raucous or anything like that. It was more the number of people and the density. Those were the issues day in, day out, that we were concerned about. If somebody has a heart attack, where will the ambulance park? Can they get in to get the person? At a certain point the answer was, "Well, we don't know." That just wasn't tenable.

Cohen: There were issues I would go down there to speak with people about. One of the big issues, towards the end, was the use of generators in the park because it was getting colder. By the time that Occupy Wall Street was evicted, my feeling was that it didn't have the same energy anymore.

The eviction

Oliver: I was at a bar in the East Village when I heard the eviction was going down. A group of us, lawyers and legal workers, dropped everything and rushed to our offices and drafted a temporary restraining order. One of us was able to get in touch with a state Supreme Court justice who we met at some very early hour in the morning.

Cohen: Something that happened that didn't really get a lot of coverage is that when the police moved to evict the occupiers from Zuccotti Park, the occupiers got an emergency restraining order from Judge Lucy Billings of the New York Supreme Court stopping them from doing it.

Oliver: I remember it was light out, and we went up to meet Justice Billings - I think we met in a diner or something. She reviewed the papers and made some modifications. The judge crossed out all kinds of things because I probably made a bunch of mistakes in the middle of the night. So we had this order. We raced downtown and tried to serve it on the cops and the city, and they ignored. We expected that. I remember going down and doing a mic check and telling people that we had gotten this order and trying to spread the news that way.

Lehmann: I was staying at my daughter's house in Westchester County, and I was on my way to the city when I got a call: Can I be in court to assist with an argument on the restraining order for Brookfield? The petitioners got an order to show cause at like 2 in the morning, which they did without notice to anybody. The court, for some reason, thought sending a fax to the general number for the corporation counsel would suffice.

Cohen: The police disregarded the order. Then a couple of hours later that same morning, through some rigamarole that I do not understand to this day, they got a different judge assigned to this case who rescinded the order and retroactively approved the police actions.

Oliver: Clearly, there was a lot of coordination going on between the police department, the mayor's office, and Brookfield.

Lehmann: There were a lot of characters in this: a lot of old lefties, people from the 1960s. There were some legitimate civil-rights lawyers, but it was a little zany. One guy started singing a Bob Dylan song in the middle of a conference call. He started singing "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." Wylie Stecklow was, I believe, the guy who sang Dylan.

Wylie Stecklow: Easily could've been me. Happy to take credit for it.

Oliver: Yes, that sounds vaguely familiar. That would have been Danny Alterman.

Dan Alterman, civil-rights lawyer: That might've been me, but I don't know. I like Bob Dylan, and I always quote Bob Dylan in my court appearances.

Elena Cohen, president of the National Lawyers Guild: No one saw the raid coming that night, which is why the police did it. Everyone was really shocked. It was horrible. The whole setup was so beautiful in so many ways - there were library stations, there were food stations, there were mutual-aid stations. It was not very dirty at all - people were cleaning it. They were taking care of this space. Sure, it absolutely had its problems, but it was a really special space.

There were these younger women crying because they had a tent that had all their belongings in it. It had their wallet. It had their laptop. And they were just watching the police throw away their belongings. They took all the books and put them in a dumpster.

Ydanis Rodriguez, city-council member arrested during the sweep who later won a settlement from the city for $30,000: I was not planning to be arrested because I had to be at a school orientation for my daughter, who was applying for a pre-K program. Going down Broadway, I moved to the left side to avoid the big crowd. At some point, like two blocks away, I suddenly found myself on the ground, with police officers on top of my body. And I can tell you that for a few seconds, I feared for my life.

Holloway: Look, Ray Kelly and the police department did what the police department does. The question is, what's the best way to do this? That was always a challenge. But in the end, it actually was fairly fast. People weren't happy, but the people who weren't happy were just unhappy that the protest wasn't going to be able to continue in that form, in that place.

Goodfriend: The police, they evicted the camp. They threw out all the books at the library. They chased us through the streets. They were extremely, extraordinarily hostile. There was open hostility from the city authorities. And when bankers on Wall Street were out in the street, they were so aggressive. There was so much vitriol that it helped clarify the deeper antagonisms that are harder to see.

Rodriguez: Even though I always recognize a lot of men and women in the NYPD for what they do to keep our streets safe, I also know there's a few bad apples - as we have in all sectors in government, as we have in academia, as we have in the private sector. For many years, we've been fighting those few bad apples in the NYPD who have been using excessive use of force. Unfortunately, they did it to me. They did it to many, to so many people.

Elena Cohen: It was an incredibly, incredibly traumatic experience for everyone. Certainly, for me, it was a horrible experience. All these people asking me to help them. And, you know, how do you help?

The legacy

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton: The legacy of the Occupy movement is very simply that Americans are now far more aware of rampant inequality of income, wealth, and power in this country than they were before. I think it moved the needle a little bit in terms of Americans being able and willing to face all of these. But in terms of actually reversing it, no. We are seeing even more inequality of income, wealth, and power than we saw 10 years ago.

Dassaro: Occupy Wall Street, it did stand for something. Did it affect certain things? Sure, it did. But it also had the ugly side, too. Still, to this day, I think it had a valid cause. You got hard-working people in this city, and then you got people who are, let's say, overcompensated for what they do. Occupy Wall Street would have had better purpose if we actually saw more of the people who were responsible for the financial mess be in jail. But we didn't see that.

Aigner: It's too harsh to say that the movement failed. It does matter that the protests at Zuccotti brought attention to a subject that was triggered by the recession. It can be said - should be said - that Occupy brought attention to a growing concentration of wealth that had struggled to get that kind of coverage. But as a political event itself, and they are not unique in this regard, I find it hard to score them highly in terms of impact.

Stecklow: People have said, "Oh, Occupy was a failure. It didn't do anything." I think that's 100% wrong. The top elected officials were talking about the 1%, about economic inequality - and that came out of Occupy Wall Street.

Lasn: Some people see it as something that came and had a moment in the sun and then fizzled out when Bloomberg kicked us out of Zuccotti Park. But from my perspective, it was an incredible success. It was the biggest "big-bang" moment that we at Adbusters had been able to catalyze. And for millions of young people around the world, it was a moment when they got politicized in the same way I got politicized back in 1968, when a small little uprising in the Latin Quarter of Paris exploded into this worldwide phenomenon, with campuses and cities all around the world full of young people demanding change.

For us, Occupy Wall Street was like the world revolution No. 2. It was like the second big wave after 1968 that somehow hit the fan. Above all, it politicized millions of young people around the world. People slept together in parks, and they came up with slogans and would brainstorm together.

Tewary: I think it had an immense impact. The midterm elections right after Occupy went significantly Democrat, largely because it was a culture change that was spearheaded by Occupy. And 10 years later, we live in a time where consideration of the disenfranchised, of minority opinions, of the poor and downtrodden - these are all things that are now part of everyday experience. There's obviously opposition to some of that, especially from the right. But things are much different than they were 10 years ago in terms of the way we talk, the words that we use.

Sam Cohen: I can point to things like the popularity of Bernie Sanders as part of the legacy of Occupy - that Occupy mainstreamed income inequality as a primary talking point, at least on the left. But the impacts I think of are the specific, concrete ones. One of the folks I met at Occupy, Sandy Nurse, just won the primary for her city-council seat in Brooklyn. She really got introduced into activism by Occupy. There are a lot of folks like that who got their awakening there.

Lasn: Even though I've been saying that Occupy Wall Street was a great success, there was also a failure. That failure was in our inability to actually unify around one or a series of demands. So we came up with 1%, 99% - we came up with a few slogans. But we never came up with one demand. And I think that was the one big failure of Occupy Wall Street, despite the fact that we politicized a whole generation of people.

Reich: The Occupy movement certainly made a lot of people aware that there was a very large and disaffected anti-corporate anti-elite in America that were angry about the corruption of the entire system, the rigging of the system. But it was so anti-organizational. It was so dedicated not to having a hierarchy, not to having a plan of action that was clearly political, not having a strategy, that it, inevitably, was doomed.

It could have been much more impactful and effective if it had a political strategy, if it had people who were strategists in the sense of political organizers. That's a different breed entirely, but you can't have a movement unless you combine activists who are getting and receiving attention with activists who, behind the scenes, are working to mobilize and organize people in a very specific political direction. Without both, you really end up just as the Occupy movement did - without very much to show for it.

Rodriguez: When a demonstration happens, people believe that the demonstration is only what you see in that location. For me, it's more than that. It's like when people talk about a church. The church is not the building - the church is made by the people who gather in the building. I think Occupy is more than a space where people got together at a certain time, 10 years ago. It's about a movement. As a result of Occupy, we saw people taking to the street led by youth who are fighting for climate justice. That's what we'll continue seeing through our generations and all the generations who come, using our DNA as members of our country to fight for social justice. The movement will never stop.

Lasn: Back during Occupy Wall Street, things were bad. But they weren't as bad as they are now. Now it feels like the world is fragmenting into some sort of dark age. Nobody knows how to fix climate change. Nobody knows how to come up with a new financial architecture for the planet that actually works. The business community in America and around the world doesn't understand or appreciate that dialogue we're living through

What's going to happen is there's going to be what I call the third force. It's going to be a bunch of angry, mostly young people around the world who get together and start looking at the real deep-down changes that need to happen if we're going to have any kind of future. The third force, the young people of the world, with their smartphones in their hands - they're going to come up with these big ideas, without which the future is impossible. It's going to rock the business community and then politics in the world in, hopefully, a much more profound way than the 1968 did or Occupy Wall Street did.