The OWS Battle to End Crony Capitalism Was Presaged in the Battle for Brooklyn

MICHAEL GALINSKY FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Presaging in many ways the context of Occupy Wall Street, Battle for Brooklyn (see trailer here) is a gripping documentary about how the 1% at the top squeeze the bottom 99% by literally evicting them from their homes and businesses.  In this case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his elite allies used the power of eminent doman, which is meant for public projects, to clear a Brooklyn neigborhood.  The catch was that the eminent domain power in this case was intended to enhance the profits of a private developer at the expense of tearing down a community. This is how the 1% operate and Mayor Bloomberg, when asked about the lofty goals of the building project being met, assured the media and New Yorkers that he had the word of the developer, Bruce Ratner, and that was good enough for him.  But, as is often the case with "crony capitalism," there is no accountability now that Ratner's promises have not been met.

The project, known as the Atlantic Yards, is currently basically a big parking lot (due to the economy) except for the construction of a stadium to house the now "Brooklyn Nets."  Michael Galinksy, who co-directs the documentary with Suki Hawley, wrote this reflection on why OWS gets it right in taking on "crony capitalism."

My 9 year old daughter loves to come with me to the movie theater when we show our film, Battle for Brooklyn.  She was one and a half years old when we started making it, and we finished it this year. Last week on the way to a screening of the film she said, "I don't get why certain words are bad.  Like it really doesn't mean anything if I say  sh#t, sh#t, sh#t.  It's just a word."  I grew up with a psychologist father who talked like a sailor, so I'm to blame for her casual relationship with curse words.  "It's cultural," I explained.  "It's a way of being in the world that is deeply ingrained and re-enforced over time.  At a certain point, everyone believes it's bad, so it gains a kind of power through the collective understanding." I then tried to bring up the idea of frames as different perspectives on society, but that was a little over her head.

Speaking of frames, when I showed the first draft of this to my partner Suki, she complained that it wasn't focused enough. This is true. It isn't focused enough for the hyper-focused kind of writing we have come to expect.  However, we are entering a new era of intellectual and emotional curiosity, so please allow me to stretch my revolutionary wings and write in a more open/Occupy inspired manner.

This discussion with my daughter got me thinking a lot about our film and our work in general. We make movies about people who are usually just outside the mainstream culture, fighting to be heard, and fighting for what they believe in.  Our films are just as much about media as they are about the people in them.  Essentially, our characters (and our films really) are often up against a culture that looks at the world through a slightly different frame. When media, or the culture, expects one kind of story and are given something else, they think that the storyteller has failed.   As with this piece, my partner thought she would be reading a super-focused blog post connecting Occupy Wall Street to our film.  Since that was her expectation, in her eyes I had failed.  Rather than looking at intention as a measure of success, our culture looks at expectation.  Through this frame of mind it's easy to see why the media initially dubbed the Occupy Wall Street movement a failure. The protesters hadn't show up with press releases, and a "clear" message that could be easily packaged or angled for the 5 o'clock news.  However, the movement was in many ways a reaction against precisely that type of frame.

Occupy Wall Street is about smashing the overriding cultural frame on the ground and stomping on it. It's no surprise that the media, which is so dependent on that very frame, had a violently negative reaction to the message.  It's exciting to see how fragile the frame was though, and how easily it is falling apart.  For the past dozen years, as we have worked on films that deal with media, we have found a somewhat intractable frame in both the making and distribution of our films.  As my Facebook friends will tell you, I have been excited about this movement from day one.

In 1999 we began a documentary about an underground publisher who was trying to re-publish a discredited bio of G.W. Bush.  In short, the publisher and the author had a very hard time trying to revive the book, and the media didn't make it any easier.  We, as the filmmakers, also had difficulty getting the media and the general public to understand what we were trying to do.  The film was titled Horns and Halos because it was about showing the good and the bad in the situation, as the book had tried to show all sides of Bush.  At our screening in Washington D.C., half of the audience thought the movie didn't attack Bush enough, and half thought we hadn't been hard enough on the publisher and author.  We had tried to step outside the divisive frame of left vs. right, but the people weren't having it.

As we were distributing Horns and Halos, we began shooting Battle for Brooklyn.  In a nutshell, the film is about a community fighting to save itself from being bulldozed for a basketball arena and 16 skyscrapers.  We read about the "development" project, branded Atlantic Yards by the developer, in the New York Times, and were immediately struck by the fact that the article sounded like a press release.  When we saw a flier screaming, "Stop the Project!" we knew that we had a way in.  We filmed the fight for well over 7 years, and increasingly focused in on the story of Daniel Goldstein, who ended up leading the fight against the project and being one of the last people in the footprint as the project was pushed through.

When we had first started the film, I would discuss the development project, and our documentary, with my neighbors (we live near the project site).  They all thought there was no use in even looking into it because it was a "done deal."  The mayor, the governor, and the senator all supported it.  "How can it be stopped?" they asked. "They shouldn't even bother, they'll drive themselves crazy."

Meanwhile, the elected officials who actually represented the direct area where the project was to be built were against it.  Most of the people living within the project site agreed with my skeptical neighbors. Six months after the project was announced, faced with the threat of eminent domain and a multi-year battle to save their homes, almost all of the condo-owners in the footprint accepted a buyout from the developer. It was later learned the buyouts had actually been paid for with public money. This left Daniel Goldstein as the only person living in his 31-unit building.  The media portrayed him as a NIMBY who was standing in the way of necessary and publicly beneficial "progress."  Thousands of his neighbors stood with him, and appreciated what he had done, but outside the circle of people who really knew what was going on, there was an effort to characterize him as a villain.

The larger community surrounding the project's footprint was somewhat divided about the development plan, but there was a strong base of opposition.  To counter this movement, the developer went right to the corporate playbook and started to buy off community groups and purchase help from others to support the project.  When the press treats reporting like theater, reality gets lost in the shuffle.  In the papers and on TV,  the community group actively fighting the project and supported by thousands of donations from local residents, gets the he said/ she said treatment in relation to the developer.  Nearly every news story gets launched by a corporate press release, and just like Occupy Wall Street, people who don't go down to check out the situation for themselves have no idea of what's going on.  One thing that has driven the OWS movement, though, is that people have gone down, and they've found a very different picture than what they've been told.  The papers are telling them one thing and Facebook is telling them another.  This process leads to deeper questions about the media, and what is really being delivered to the public.

When a developer spends millions of dollars to control a narrative, it is quite effective. In one scene, which didn't make it into the film, ACORN Executive Director Bertha Lewis announces that her group has negotiated a 50/50 housing deal.  According to this deal, half of the apartments in the complex will be "affordable."  She is asked about the people who live in the project site, and replies that they will all be offered comparable apartments in the new complex.  Afterwards, Daniel Goldstein confronts her with the fact that most of the people in the footprint have already been forced out.  She admits that she hasn't actually started talking to residents yet.  Two weeks later, the developer announced that they were adding 2300 condos, and all of a sudden the 50/50 housing deal looked more like 70/30.  A couple of years later it was revealed that the developer had given a financially troubled ACORN a $500,000 dollar gift, and a $1 million low-interest loan that was never repaid.

One scene that did make the film's final cut reveals that another group that supported the project had expected to receive all of its funding from Forest City Ratner Companies.  In fact, of the six groups that signed a community benefits agreement with the developer, only two, including ACORN, had a significant track record of working with their communities in a large-scale way.  Four of them did not even exist before the project was announced.

Now the project has been forced through.  Nearly 1,000 people and businesses were displaced, and a heavily subsidized, privately-owned arena is under construction  All the buildings have been torn down and there are no apparent plans for the promised housing.  Instead, there are at least 16 acres of demolished and empty lots. Much of this now dormant space will persist as massive parking lots until economic conditions improve.  Of the 15,000 jobs promised, the amount of workers on site has fluctuated between a few hundred to five or six hundred.  Of those jobs, only a handful have gone to local residents.

A project that was sold as a panacea for poverty, unemployment and a housing crisis has ended up as a mostly vacant quagmire in the middle of Brooklyn.  Still, two days after officer Bolonga maced people in the face at Occupy Wall Street, the developer of the Atlantic Yards project and the government put on a big show (with Jay Z and his Maybach on display) to announce that ...drum roll please...they would be changing the name of the New Jersey Nets to the Brooklyn Nets!  Rome was burning, and the press was eating free food and dutifully reporting on this major announcement while ignoring the real situation that was going on just over the bridge.  There were literally hundreds of press people present for the Jay Z-Nets announcement, and for the most part, they all printed their stories and ran their footage as requested.  It was a giant magic trick:  Look over here at the shiny car and the celebrity and ignore all of the broken promises.

As with Horns and Halos, we've had a bit of a difficult time getting people to understand what we were trying to do with the Battle for Brooklyn, and frankly we released it before people were quite ready for its narrative.  Essentially it is the Occupy Wall Street film before OWS.  Michael O'Keefe laid it out well in his article in the Daily News on October 18th.

Our film lays bare all of the elements that have enraged the masses.  An extreme version of corptocracy-a willing government taken over by corporate interests against the interests of the people-in which a developer plans a project, calls all the shots, and gets the government to steamroll the public process and provide unbelievable levels of subsidies. The media follows the corporate script, reporting on the story when the developer issues press releases, and dutifully repeating ridiculous assertions about revenues, housing, and jobs without doing any due diligence whatsoever.  As a citizen, it was infuriating and mind numbing.  As a filmmaker, it was painful.  As we are not "accredited media," we were shut out of the dog and pony show on numerous occasions.

People are fed up with outsourcing their rage to groups like MoveOn, and thinking that the few extra bucks a month they pay for their Credo phone will change anything.

We had one great line in the film that we eventually took out, because we found a way to show it instead of tell it, but it's relevant here: "It's in the interest of the developer to keep the community divided, because if the community is divided he can get what he wants pushed through."  In early cuts of the film the audience felt cheated out of their own discovery of this concept when it was handed to them so directly.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is largely related to this idea.  The people are uniting, and it will be much harder for those who want to defeat them this time.