The Trouble Is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street

While Occupy protests were taking place across the nation in Fall of 2011, a lone website, ＂Occupy the Boardroom,＂ invited Americans who would never make it to an occupation to write down their beliefs about the financial system and their experiences with loans and banking. 8,000 letters from individuals appeared in six weeks.

Signed by those affected by recent history--Democrats and Republicans, property-owners and struggling families, businesspeople and retirees, immigrants and Mayflower descendants, religious leaders and fervent capitalists, and a lot of bank employees past and present--these letters said what Americans have gotten from our banks, what they believe, and how they think things should change.

In partnership with Occupy the Boardroom, a team of young editors read through and gathered the most important, compelling, and diverse of these letters. Hear, at last, what American citizens know about their country rather than the opinions of talking heads. Find out what Americans want all of us to do differently.

The letters are polite, funny, outraged, moving, instructive, and inspiring. They are one of the most immediate and unfiltered records ever assembled of what went on in the housing bubble and the financial crisis--written by We the People.

Mark Greif is a cofounder and coeditor of n+1 and teaches at the New School. Dayna Tortorici is an associate editor of n+1. Kathleen French is a fiction writer who studied English at Harvard. She is originally from Dallas, Texas. Emma Janaskie is a writer living in Providence. Nick Werle studies financial economics and white-collar crime in Brooklyn. Occupy the Boardroom is a website created by volunteers from community and labor organizations as well as the Occupy movement that allows everyday Americans to send personal e-mails to the nation’s top bank and corporate executives. n+1 is a magazine of literature, culture, and politics that is published three times per year.