In September, as the subprime lending bubble burst, I started spending afternoons and evenings hanging around the Wall Street area. Major media outlets had moved anchors and reporters to downtown Manhattan to be “at the epicenter” of the crisis, yet few of these journalists (excepting the always-prescient Ira Glass) seemed anxious to publicize the obvious: nobody here seemed to care. At least, there were few outward appearances of what could be called “panic”; everyone downtown seemed to be doing what people down here always did. Bankers, traders, accountants and lawyers went out to their colonial-themed grilles, tourists took pictures, and that was pretty much that.

So when the first big protest happened, it was nothing so much as a relief. Here, finally, was a response that made sense, and if it didn’t equal the hysterical pitch of our president’s calls to panic, it was at least respite from the cognitive dissonance.

The first protest was a giant, roving band from across the political spectrum, from Maoists to Socialists to Ron Paul Libertarians calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve (when briefly mentioned on the local news, of course, all protesters were described as “Marxists”). The brainchild of journalist Arun Gupta, popularized on Naomi Klein’s blog, it felt like a spontaneous show of collective frustration, with no clear central organization.

Later protests were coordinated far enough in advance – and with the proper permits – to allow the NYPD to barricade the protesters inside “free speech zones.” Yet the deeply cynical goal of these pens – to keep protesters’ opinions out of the ears of the very people they were trying to reach – doesn’t work so well on Wall Street. The narrow lanes of the Financial District are the winding remnants of a much smaller city, built in an era when political confrontations were a bloody fact of life. This section of Manhattan does not lend itself to the opinion segregation practiced uptown and throughout the United States. When protesters here yell, brokers hear it.

Copyright Last Exit 2008