Ineffeciency of Occupy Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street movement started out as a valiant attempt to bring awareness to stakeholders about the growing inequality and uneven distribution of wealth in North America. They had the numbers, catchy sayings and a breadth of disadvantaged Americans looking to fight for the cause. The initial take-over of Zuccotti Park brought media attention that spread far further than North America and Canada. It was the backbone for the uprising in over 80 countries including major cities such as Munich, Seattle, Brussels, Tokyo, Seoul, Rome, Puerto Rico, Madrid, and Santiago, as well as numerous cities in the United States. (Taylor, 2011)

Whether Occupy Wall Street was effective or not, is not as straightforward as many people believe. If not to only bring awareness to the subject, it started a movement around the world giving those who may not have had a voice, an outlet to express their anger and frustration. It spurred national conversation and “added weight to policy discussions from mortgage relief, to student loans to taxation” (Beucke, 2011).

While it drove the need for discussion, it also had many tangible effects on the banks for which they were protesting. The Bank of America retracted its plan to instate a 5-dollar debit fee on November 1st 2011, due to the Occupy Wall Street protests. The co-chief operation officer, David Darnell stated:

“We have listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks, and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee. Our customers’ voices are most important to us. As a result, we are not charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so” (Goessl, 2011).

Many other banks have also decided to drop their debit fees such as JP Morgan chase, SunTrust, Regions Banks and Wells Fargo (Block, 2011). Change doesn’t necessarily need to large to be significant. The village of Hampstead on Long Island, New York, moved 12.5 Million dollars from JPMorgan and Chase to a smaller local bank (Rose, 2011).

The initial protest was meant to “fight back against the richest 1% of people that are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future” (Occupy Wall Street, 2012), but quickly turned into a collections of misfits, homelessness, and hypocrisy. While half the crowd were true occupy supporters, the other half were disadvantaged Americans hollering for justice on unrelated troubles.

Hypocrisy set in when some of the richest celebrities began backing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Mark Ruffalo (an actor who starred in movies such as Shutter Island, Collateral, and 13 going on 30) tweeted “The corporate world with record profits