Occupy Wall Street Interviews by David Perkins

Transcription from beginning:

Jason: Hi, I’m Jason Ivy and we’re here at Occupy Wall Street, it’s Saturday October 22^nd, 4pm, we’re here to talk to the protestors, we’re gonna find out who they are, what their views on capitalism are, socialism.

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(What does ‘House Elves’ mean)

Woman 1: Erm, it’s a Harry Potter reference. House Elves are slaves that have to like, literally everything their masters tell them and if they go against their masters they have to punish themselves. And that’s the relationship our government has with big corperations.

Jason: So you want to get the Government out of Private Industry, is that right?

Woman 1: Other way around, I wanna get private industry out of our government: no more of their money in our politics.

Man 1: The goals in the Tea party and the Occupy Wall Street Movements are really at their heart, if you come from the rhetoric, their really the same. So, what I’m trying to send, is that if we can get behind the issue of the Fed, the Fed reserve is a private bank it’s the way that Wall Street controls the government. It’s actually two sections, there’s a private bank which is the Federal Reserve system, and then there’s the Regulatory Agency, which the Federal board of governors. So the board of Governers are supposed to regulate the banking system. They stack with Member executives from the member banks. So they don’t actually regulate themselves, they regulate the 99%, so they regulate their competition, so Goldman Sachs and Chase deny their Sermons and Brothers bailout money using their political influence to put their competition out of business and they regulate the rest of the economy, but they never actually really regulate themselves.

Jason: So you do think that all people that make up the 1% are really bad people?

Man 1: Oh no, not at all. I think individually it almost doesn’t matter, I think many of them are people of conscience, they’re good people, they may even care about social justice, the environment and given their massive amount of resources, they may even dedicate some percentage of that towards those goals, but individually that doesn’t matter. Institutionally, it’s monstrous and destroying this country and the planet, so…

Jason: So you’re not against, say, individual entrepreneurs -

Man 1: No not at all

Jason: Getting rich –

Man 1: No, I’m not against corporations or capitalism in the abstract. What I’m against is sort of a… is sort of corporate capitalism as it’s currently practiced in this country and exemplified specifically by the financial institutions and the banks in this country have gone completely out of hand – their corrupt, their fraudulent, their felons, eluded the American economy to the tune of several trillion dollars and they should be prosecuted.

Jason: What percentage of the Federal Budget consists of military spending?

Woman 2: You can see it right here (holding a sign) 60% - it’s huge – it is true.

Jason: According to the Federal Budget, it’s in it’s 20s. They said it’s about 23%.

Woman 2: Well that’s because you’ve included the social security. If you take it – Oh yeah, if you take social security, take it in put it out for social security.

Jason: But social security and military spending, how do they relate?

Woman 2: The discretionary budget, this is our tax payer’s dollars and we’re spending well over half of them on the military.

Jason: But that’s purely discretionary spending

Woman 2: Right, that’s the way it should be. The social security, we pay it in in order to get it out later – it’s not to pay it in –

We’re not paying it in to spend it on the military or anything else.

Jason: So, but I think you’re wanting to count that as a separate budget almost –

Woman 2: Of course it is.

Jason: But I don’t think our federal government count it as –

Woman 2: No, because they don’t want it to look as if were spending this enormous amount on the military. They wanna hide that behind the social security.

Jason: But the Fed has played a role in stabilizing the currency over the years?

Man 2: No, they have played a role in destabilizing. Intentionally destabilizing the currency, absolutely.

Jason: Why would they intentionally do it then?

Man 2: Because the top percent of Wall Street makes money, whether you’re in up or down market. They don’t care about market cycles, they create the market cycles, but what they do is during down cycles, they suck the wealth out of the middle class through bailouts. All year, no matter what cycle it is, it’s sucking wealth out through crony capitalism through contracts, sweetheart deals, five hundred dollar hammers, etc. And then in down markets, they get bailouts and subsidies and tax credits and all that. They use the Federal reserve system to socialise loss and then they privatize their gains, sending off for sure.

Man 3: For me, the mere exsistance of a central bank suggests that the government feels that it has the right to meddle in the market. That it has the right to pick winners and losers.

Yeah, I fundamentally believe in the capitalist system, except for the idea, I mean, it stops being capitalist once my tax dollars bailout a bank. The flip side of capitalism, the only thing that makes the market work, is that if you take too much risk, you might get rich, but then if you fail, you fail. I believe in property rights, I believe in freedom and free will and free markets, but it seems to me that the banks have sort of hand their cake and eaten it too in terms of picking the parts of capitalism they like, and then picking the parts of socialism that they like.

Jason: Then, why do you want to prosecute Ben Bernanke?

Man 3: At best his monetary policy is inflationary, at worst it may be hyper inflationary. We don’t know yet, we haven’t seen the full effects, sort of unfold, and I would argue that weakening the dollar, weakens the country, weakening the country strengthens our enemies and to me that’s close enough to be treason.

Jason: What do you hope this movement will accomplish?

Man 3: Either massive, from the ground up, political reform or revolution.

Jason: If Andrew Jackson were alive today, would you be a Republican or a Democrat?

Man 3: The thing is, I don’t even agree with that division ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’. If I would pick the four or five politicians who I’d most support, we have Bernie Sanders, who is an Independent, we have Ron Paul who is a Libertarian, you have Alan Greyson who is a Democrat. What ties them all together is that they are all fundamentally moral people who really really care about their country.