Focusing on the emerging Occupy Wall Street Movement, reflecting Americans' frustration with the class warfare in which the middle and working classes are being decimated, BMX-NY participants pondered, 'What's it got to do with us?' through the following prisms Friday:

Is Wall Street guilty of anything, or is it just our imagination?

"We want to be interested in this because [it demonstrates that] the winds of change can come from any direction...the Middle East, Africa...Anywhere..."

"Yes, [Wall St. is guilty] of sabotaging the world economy...they loaned people money to buy homes they knew they couldn't afford...Something seems wrong to me when you bet against the mortgages you sold to people...and Blacks were most affected..."

"We don't stand up for ourselves...Nobody's gonna' care about our plight until we do..."

"Not only Wall Street, the pharmaceuticals...There need to be regulations on these entities..."

"When Bush came into office, he got rid of all the regulations...If they're allowed to do whatever they want to do, [what do you expect]...They can offer a $2M mortgage to someone who's making $20K a year...They must turn a profit for their stockholders, and they will do that [no matter who it hurts]..."

"There seems to be some misconception that it's the people's fault...Derivatives...Nobody could explain [what they were]...but [which] involved a lot of fine print...We tend to want to blame the victim..."

"A lot of these regulations were put in place during the depression and were removed by Reagan which led to the financial breakdown in the late eighties..."

{Facilitator says, "Yes, F.D.R. instituted [the Glass - Steagall Act, establishing the FDIC] financial reforms which were designed to rein in Wall Street speculation and prevent another Depression...Ronald Regan first began dismantling those reforms, which led to the Savings and Loan scandal of the early nineties...and George W. continued that assault, ushering in the kind of recklessness that precipitated the financial collapse of 2008..."}

51% of Black men were unemployed in Harlem before the recession.  Does it matter?

"America is a capitalistic business enterprise which we built...At some point, we fell off that economic train..."

{Facilitator asks, "The construction that America is a capitalistic business enterprise is an apt one...and, it was indeed built on our free labor...but, when you say, at some point we fell off the economic train...are you referring to the Jim Crow, or Segregation era, when we were entrepreneurs by necessity because the only way we could derive many goods and services was by our supplying them?..."}

"Yes...When I was a kid in Harlem, we owned businesses...[Today] we are not business minded..."

"A lot of people think economics is money...Economics is the behavior people enact around money...If we try to equate the economic picture with our condition, we'll miss the point..."

"Twenty, thirty, forty years out, City Planners [as part of] political administrations decide what communities will look like..."

"[The reason Black males in Harlem have been unemployed at 51+% for so long] It's deeper than the economy...It's systemic...Corporate leaders and politicians...The systemic view is this...They put [forth] a fa�ade about basketball [to Black male youth] when they know only about .1% will get there [to the pros]...creating crabs in a barrel...[questing to be] Entertainment [stars]...The rich have so much power [and they] give the impression that you have to be wealthy to be happy..."

"At first, the American Dream was to get a job and provide for your family...Then , they sold us a new American Dream that you have to have it all...We're talking about predatory Capitalism...We were sold a bad bill of goods..."

"Culturally, historically, whenever there's a downturn, we're always the odd-man out...We're still in a system where, if you get good grades, you can get into a good college and get a good job..."

"[A new statistic just released says] Unemployment among 16-29 year-olds is at 55%...the highest since WWII..."

{Facilitator says, "In New York State, only 26% of Black males graduate from high school...In New York City, only 28%...and that's not an accident...And consider the kinds of employment available to people with high school degrees...What is it?..."}

"Mostly in the service sector..."

{Facilitator says, "Right...and manufacturing...the manufacturing base has been shipped over seas..."} 

"There is a great responsibility we have to take [for our children not being educated]...I'm new in Harlem...I listen to how people talk to their children...there's a connection between how people talk to each other and their ability to get jobs...These babies having babies are not educated...and so they can't educate their children..."

"Our problem is, we teach our children to get an education so they can get a good job...Whites teach their children to get an education so they can rule the world..."

"We have to be entrepreneurs...and redistribute the money in our communities...that's what Oprah did...which is why she was able to send all those hundreds of kids to Morehouse and build that school in South Africa..."

"We have so many young Brothers arrested for marijuana possession that the Police Commissioner had to tell the police not to arrest people for small amounts of marijuana...because they couldn't process them all...I remember going to apply for a job and a woman who was conducting the interviews telling us, 'I'm not going to lie to you...If you have any history of arrests on your record, don't even bother applying'...A lot of Brothers just got up and walked out...When a lot of young Black men go to get jobs, that's why they can't find any..."

{Facilitator says, "That's a vitally important point...in municipalities across the country, starting in the third grade, Black male youths' reading and math scores are tracked so that, by the fourth grade, those municipalities can project ten fifteen years hence how many new prison cells they will need to build...It's no accident that when our children hop the trains...which children are sometimes wont to do...that, what happens?..."}

"They're fingerprinted..."

{"That's right, and have criminal records initiated...Likewise, when children get into fights with each other, which children are wont to do...what procedure is now instituted?..."}

"They're taken to jail and put through the system..."

{"And, what is it that public middle and high school children are met with at the entrance to the buildings?..."} 

"Metal detectors..."

{"They say it's to prevent guns from being brought into the schools, but what other possible ramifications might the metal detector searches upon entering the institution have on our children?...It's preparing them [psychologically] to be criminalized...and to be treated as criminals...And for this subtle priming, including actually establishing criminal records on many for infractions which have heretofore been [and in other locales are still] treated as mere social transgressions common to youth...many, many Black men are deemed unemployable for having criminal records..."}

"I don't think the 51% unemployment among Black men in Harlem has anything to do with Wall Street...It's systemic racism...It's not Wall Street..."

{Facilitator says, "They're connected...When we remember, as someone has said, that American Capitalism was built on our free labor...and that, shortly following the end of Slavery came the Industrial Revolution in which the public education system was instituted to train workers to produce and buy the products manufactured by the economy...and that, with automation, the manufacturing base has been outsourced...and that, at the same time, the capitalist imperative is to 'buy,' 'buy,' 'buy'...such that, everywhere in the environment all day every day of our lives are imbedded messages stoking and playing on our fears in order to get us to buy things to make us feel better...no matter whether we can afford or really need any of the stuff...By now, much of the slack of the disappearing manufacturing base has been picked up by the prison industrial complex...The prison, of course is the new plantation where they still get our labor producing goods for free...Is slavery legal in America?"}

"No..." "No..."  "No..." "Of course not..." 

{Yes it is...The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution states that, 'There shall be no slavery nor involuntary servitude except where one is convicted of a crime'...What does that mean?...It means that, once you have been convicted of a crime, yo' ass is a slave...and that is the law of the land to this very day..."}

"52,000 manufacturing plants have closed in America over the last decade..."

"I'm happy to see that the majority of the people who are Occupying Wall Street do not look like us...We've had the German Shepherds turned on us, and the [water] hoses, and now the people from 'the big house' are saying, 'Wait! I can't get a job!..."

"All this 'isms' are connected..." For anyone who wants to dismiss this movement, or believe the protesters have no clear vision, I did some research, and on their website, they list their demands as follows:

1) Restoration of the living wage...

2) Institute a universal single payer healthcare system...

3) Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment...

4) Free college education...

5) Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same [time] bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand...

6) One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now...

7) One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants...

8) Racial and gender equal rights amendment...

9) Open borders migration. Anyone can travel anywhere to work and live...

10) Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system...

11) Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now!...

12) Outlaw all credit reporting agencies...

13) Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their 'yeah' or 'nay' to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union..."

How do Wall Street's financial policies impact our community?

"Greed is an insatiable appetite...Black people are imprisoned because of greed...Corporations support politicians who keep us cordoned off in communities where we [have carrots dangled in front of us to keep us scrambling for material things]..."

"What do you mean 26% of our kids get through school?...We should be outraged...We should be occupying someplace..."

"I was in education...Education was always important to my family...My paternal grandparents were killed...They [Whites] burned down the school [for Black children] and my grandfather set out to build it back up, and they killed him...and my grandmother had a heart attack...They've always tried to keep us from being educated...We have to control our own education..."

"Why aren't we mentoring them?...It should be a normal thing for us to mentor...If a sister is having trouble with her son, we should be there to step in and help..."

What, if any, changes would you like to see come out of this process?

"Free health care, free higher education, and socialism..."

"When Jerry Brown was Governor of California [the first time, he saw to it that] all you had to do was be a citizen of the state and you went to the State College for free..."

"[I want to see] more Black businesses, more young people learning trades, and empowerment seminars..."

{Facilitator asks, "How might we reasonably expect those outcomes if we're not there to press for them?"}

"What we should do is ignore the 99% thing and get vouchers so that our parents can control the schools...So that, instead of going to the schools they want us to go to, the money goes to the parents to use in whatever schools they want to send their children to..."
"What we should be concerned about is [that] the fraudulent practices among these people be exposed and that they be held accountable for them..."

"If you are not part of the 1%, you are a part of the 99%...I would like to see some dialogue between some Black organizations about what we want to come from this movement...How are we going to repair racist practices that have prevented us from higher education?..."

"[I want] the bailed out companies [to be held] accountable for not having created jobs and bi-partisan oversight committees..."

Should same gender loving men be present in this protest?

"I would like for BMX to make a presence down there [in Viscotti Park]...I have been so frustrated...A Black squigee man was arrested...I want us to demand [that] the demonization of Black men be stopped...Demand that banks lend money to Black businesses...Stop funding corporate attacks against unions...For them to see Black homosexuals standing up on behalf of the Black community will be powerful...A lot of blame has been put on Black parents for not raising their kids well...But there has been little discussion of the forces that impede those parents...that derail those Black kids...The power of being present [cannot be underestimated]..."

"If we're going to go down there, then let's do that in Harlem [too]..."

"We had a conversation about political alliances, and sometimes the people you align with, you don't necessarily share all goals with, but [you] have some common interests...There was a point during which the Gay Liberation Movement worked with the Panthers...[and there was a point when] the biggest contributors to the NAACP were Jews...We have to build political alliances with these people [in this movement]..."

"BMX-NY has been good about building alliances...like last summer with the National Action Network and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in the community forum for the Black community on manhood...That was handled very well..."

{Facilitator asks, "Who among us wants to go down and join the protests at Zuccotti Park?..."} (aka Liberty Plaza)  

All but two participants raise their hands.
{Facilitator says, "Fine then...we'll go..."}