So we should put Monday’s action into perspective. As Andrew Leonard pointed out, there is almost no way to effectively target the 1 percent without causing serious collateral damage among the many workers who are just barely scraping by. And so Leonard argued that a prolonged port shutdown would devastate California, while leaving Goldman Sachs comparatively untouched. In “The costs of a port shutdown,” he declares that “Despite noble intentions, Occupy’s tactic hurt a wounded economy more than it hurt the 1 percent.”

Leonard has a point. It would be callous to deny that Monday’s work stoppage hurt “independent” truck drivers who lost a day of work. This is a serious thing; as Leonard himself reported two months ago, being one of the 82 percent of truck drivers who are classified as “independent contractors” means being responsible for all the costs of driving a truck without any of the protection afforded to employees. So when a driver can’t bring in any income—say, because protesters have blockaded the port—drivers will still be on the hook for costs of the operation, paying overhead without any income.

It is hardly surprising that some independent truck drivers were quite upset about the shutdown; Gavin Aronsen of Mother Jones reported that a trucker on Oakland said he risked losing $200 to $400 in pay, and even kicked over a sign reading “truckers have rights to union wages.”

At the same time, this was not a prolonged port shutdown. The longest lasting blockade was in Oakland – in which I took part – where one shift was actively blocked and the two shifts following it were preemptively canceled by the port. And on Tuesday, when ILWU workers asked the occupiers to allow the port to re-open, Occupy Oakland complied. Those ships are being unloaded right now, and truckers are back on the road.

We need a sense of perspective here. On the one hand, anyone who thought a one-day disruption of West Coast ports was going to bring Goldman Sachs to its knees is out of their minds. I don’t know anyone who believed that was going to happen. But actions like this one keep the movement alive, something that has very much been in question.

When police destroyed Occupy Oakland’s camp, for example, they scattered and fragmented its occupants (who cannot reoccupy the space, by the way, because the city leaves sprinklers on to keep the ground a saturated muddy mess, dubbed “Lake Quan”). And as Ben Ehrenreich puts it, with part one of the movement over, Occupy finds itself at a crossroads. Now that all the camps have been destroyed by concerted police crackdowns, does the Occupy movement even exist anymore? Monday’s action demonstrated that it does. When denied the local orientation of its roots, the Occupy movement is capable of playing another hand, even of raising the stakes.

Raising the stakes, of course, raises hard questions. On the other hand, what else is there? As we have learned, peacefully setting up camps — in one of the least confrontational forms of civil disobedience imaginable –  is something that American cities will simply not allow. So what is left to the Occupy movement but more aggressive and confrontational tactics? Since they are not allowed to camp peacefully in public parks, expect more work stoppages, more foreclosure defenses, and more building occupations.

I think this is a good thing, when put in proper perspective. Andrew Leonard’s argument is a common one: While protest is fine in theory, the cost of this particular protest is too onerous. But in an economy where every shock to the system disproportionately hurts the working class — first, last and worst — vulnerable workers will always serve as an effective human shield for the Goldman Sachs of the world, who will always be too big to fail. And if we wait for the magical silver bullet, and we do nothing until we find it, nothing will change. No target will ever be the right and perfect one, no action will ever specifically and exclusively target the 1 percent, and so we will take no action at all.

Inaction is unacceptable. As one of the truck drivers who wrote this eye-opening Open Letter From America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Port told Andrew Leonard a few months ago, “Every day is getting worse.” And from the beginning, Occupy Wall Street has argued one very simple thing: that our political and economic system is not only broken, but incapable of fixing itself; that the game is not only rigged, but closed to new players; that the status quo is not only bad, but radically unacceptable and getting worse, every day.

This fact changes the political calculus. The ongoing silent violence of the status quo is vastly greater than whatever very mild damage might have been caused by the port shutdown. Compared to the earthquake to working Californians, for example, that Gov. Jerry Brown’s trigger cuts will soon cause – not for one day, but with no end in sight – a day’s loss of wages is a relatively minor matter (if only relatively).

Which brings us back to the root problems that require more radical solutions. The port was the target in Oakland, after all, because it’s a public agency, owned and run by the city of Oakland and required by its charter to be run for the benefit of the city of Oakland at large. But, in practice, it isn’t, and in this sense, it’s a perfect symbol for the public subsidies to private industry that we all pay for, but from which only the 1 percent actually benefit.

While the infrastructure that makes the port’s activities possible – the railroads and freeways and utility grids – were all built by enormous public investment, and while the land was taken by eminent domain (in many cases, from disadvantaged African-American homeowners and businesspeople, in the days when Oakland was strictly segregated), very little of the enormous wealth passing through the port ever finds its way to Oakland’s impoverished schools, for example.

Oakland is not a poor city, as the president of the Oakland Education Association pointed out at an Occupy press conference, or at least it shouldn’t be. Its apparent poverty is a function of the shell game paid with the finances of the port, its major industry, which operates rent-free on public land. While bondholders absorb most of the profits from the original investment, operating profits from the port never seem to find their way back to Oakland’s coffers.

Instead they are being reinvested in making the port as profitable as possible for companies like SSA Marine shipping (in which Goldman Sachs is a primary investor), in real-estate speculation, or in things like making Oakland airport more accessible to the city’s wealthy travelers (while cutting funding for the buses used by lower-income workers).

In short, while Andrew Leonard is at least a little bit right to see a port blockade as something like cutting off the nose to spite the face, I want to offer another metaphor: stopping the port for a day was a poke in the eye to stop the mouth from eating its own hands.

(Read Leonard’s “The costs of a port shut down” here. See Leonard’s comments below.)

John and I walked over with a couple of other media people.  He covered the Zuccotti Park eviction for Salon, live-tweets most of the OWS events in the city, and has gotten to know many of the independent journalists who document the movement.  We arrived at the designated area, which felt like an enormous common space in a mall.  The main floor was decorated with Christmas trees, festive lights and public tables and chairs, with a wide marble staircase leading up to a balcony that overlooked the space.

The protesters — maybe 100 or so — had gathered in the center of the floor and were dancing and chanting, “Occupy Brookfield!”  A long line of police began to form in the periphery, and John and the other media people dispersed to take pictures.  As the police formed an outer circle to surround the large group, the crowd began to disperse.  Many of the protesters headed up the marble staircase away from the cops, and a small group bolted up a nearby escalator.

That was when everything escalated completely out of control.  The escalator was stopped.  Suddenly, the outer circle of cops was swarming in and violently pushing people away.  John had been standing near the crowd, taking video.  I was about 20 feet from him, and when I looked back in his direction, I saw his blue hood on the ground.  I ran toward him and slid to the ground, leaning in between people’s knees to take pictures.  John was face down on the ground being handcuffed, his glasses flung across the floor and people screaming, “Stop, stop, he didn’t do anything!”

A cop pulled me up by my shoulders and told me to step back.  I said, “He’s my brother.”  Several cops pushed me away as I asked, “What is he being arrested for?  He was taking pictures.”  A cop said, “He didn’t produce an official press pass, so that means he was resisting arrest.”  I quite literally didn’t understand, so I said, “What?”  At that point, the same cop said, “If you don’t step back immediately, you will be arrested too.”

I was pushed behind a line of police.  I stood there, several inches from them, and heard myself saying, “Why are you doing this?”

A protester next to me was yelling at the cops, something about free speech or unnecessary force or any number of logical things to say at a time like this; I was too distracted to pay attention.  But then, an officer said to him, “Get out of my face.  I have a gun, and I don’t need people up in my face like this.”

I said, “What did you just say?”

“I don’t like people in my face,” he said.

“I just saw my brother thrown to the ground by you guys,” I said.

“That wasn’t me,” he said.

“But it was the police.  And now you just threatened to take out your gun?”

Another officer approached me and said, “Stop talking to him that way.”

I turned to him.  “I’m talking to him because he told me about his gun.  Why did he say that?”

The second officer just said, emphatically, “I don’t know why he said that,” which made me smile for a second.

But that didn’t last long, because all around me, the arrests were still happening.  Cops were literally chasing people into corners.  I went up to one and again asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“This is private property,” he responded.

“But this is a public area,” I said back.

“Get out,” he told me.  Another cop passing by told him, “Stop talking to her, you don’t have time for this shit,” and pulled him toward a group of cops making arrests.

In a massive push, everyone was forced from the building, shoved out the doors by police in riot gear, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.  In moments, the building was barricaded and anyone left inside was trapped.

Outside, the cops formed a line in front of the glass building, and inside, the arrested were lined up in chairs against the windows, their hands behind their backs. My brother was taken to the 7thPrecinct, along with 17 others arrested at the Winter Garden.  According to his tweets from the paddy wagon, eight out of the 10 people in there had cameras or iPhones out or were livestreaming.  To quote his tweet, “Lots of eyes arrested today.”

The role independent journalists have played in documenting and disseminating Occupy is one of the things that makes the movement so powerful and unique.  After the media blackout during the Zuccotti raid, the significance of citizen photographers and citizen tweeters became even more clear.  Today felt like a blatant crackdown on the individuals who were documenting the behavior of the police.  But whether it was a tactical decision or a wild coincidence, the police were unable to silence the cacophony of voices.  The entire morning was still captured in pictures, in video, in livestreams.  Lots of eyes were arrested today, but thankfully, many more eyes saw it happen.

It’s a huge mess.

Some people have noticed that “student loan debt” comes up a lot among the Wall Street Occupiers and the members of the 99 percent movement. Often, older people, who either attended school when tuition was reasonable, or who didn’t attend college at all in an era when a high school diploma was enough of a qualification for a stable, middle-class career, tend to think this is all the entitled whining of spoiled kids. They don’t understand that these kids accepted a home mortgage worth of debt before they ever even had a regular income, based on phony promises, and that the debt is inescapable, regardless of life circumstances or ability to pay.

Thanks to the horrific 2005 bankruptcy bill, one of the most nakedly venal modern examples of Congress serving the interests of the rentiers and creditors over the vast majority a number of congressional actions, debtors cannot discharge student loans through bankruptcy. The government is shielded from the risk, and creditors are licensed to collect by almost any means they deem necessary, giving no one in charge any real incentive (beyond basic human decency) to fix the situation.

In other words, this is unprecedentedly awful for an entire generation of young people just entering adulthood.

“It’s going to create a generation of wage slavery,” says Nick Pardini, a Villanova University graduate student in finance who has warned on a blog for investors that student loans are the next credit bubble — with borrowers, rather than lenders, as the losers.

Even if by some miracle our unemployed and underemployed debt-laden graduates all win decent jobs tomorrow, the money they make will go into paying off these now-delinquent loans instead of anything productive for the economy as a whole. Banks will continue to see massive profits, in other words.

The impossibility of escaping student loan debt is why an industry sprang up to foist useless, overpriced degrees on vulnerable people. It’s a scam, but a profitable one, and respectable enough for major establishment players to feel comfortable making a killing on it.

Like, for instance, Kaplan University, a chain of for-profit colleges built on winning free government student aid money and attracting suckers to borrow small fortunes.

The crooks are shameless. The Fiscal Times asked a bunch of predictable brain-dead airport bookstore luminaries (Dr. Oz! Mort Zuckerman!) to share one idea to “solve our fiscal crisis.” Here’s my favorite entry:

If I could do one thing, it would be to ensure the future of for-profit education companies, which this administration seems bent on eliminating. The Washington Post Company has struggled hard to be a good and decent company, but our for-profit education division is under fire by the administration, as are other for-profit education companies like Apollo and Strayer. (Full disclosure: I and my family have an ownership interest in WPO.) The majority of students in for-profit education companies are minorities, which makes you wonder how shutting down these companies will help achieve the president’s goal of having more college graduates in the U.S.

This wisdom comes from Lally Weymouth, “Senior Associate Editor” at the Washington Post and also part owner of the Washington Post Co., owner of for-profit college company Kaplan, the exploitative education corporation that subsidizes the money-losing newspaper. Lally’s idea for solving America’s “fiscal crisis” is to allow her to continue enriching herself by burying already poor people in paralyzing debt.

But, of course, she’s only doing it to help those poor creatures who otherwise couldn’t attend schools! If she happens to make a killing doing so, then the market is working its magic, I guess. This is the same argument used by exploitative payday lenders — loan sharks in ghettos — to justify predatory lending habits targeted at impoverished and vulnerable communities. Only it’s coming from one of the most respectable members of Washington’s elite, and not the proprietor of a check-cashing joint.

Of course, you know an industry is generally bad for the world as a whole once Goldman Sachs gets into it. Goldman bought part of predatory for-profit college chain EDMC in 2006, and it’s already made a killing driving random people into crushing debt. EDMC uses sales tactics taken directly from subprime mortgage hustlers to find and retain customers.

But employees recounted a distinct culture shift once the company went private under Goldman Sachs and the other private equity investors, as day-to-day operations warped from a commitment to students and their success into an environment laser-focused on hitting mandated enrollment targets. New recruits were viewed simply as a conduit for federal student assistance dollars, the employees said, and pressure mounted from management to enroll anyone at any cost.

So we have incredibly rich and powerful elite institutions joining forces to bleed youths and minorities and poor people dry. And people wonder why there’s marching in the streets.

CORRECTION: I said the 2005 bankruptcy bill made student loans nondisacharable in bankruptcy. A number of readers wrote in to correct me: It was actually 1998 amendments to the higher education act that removed all statutes of limitations on student loan debt and made the debt undischargable in bankruptcy, except in cases of extreme hardship, which the courts have made effectively impossible to prove. Similar votes in 1991 and the 1970s also made escaping student loan debt more difficult. The awful 2005 bill added private student loans to the loans that could not be discharged without meeting that standard. I apologize for the error.

Is it too much to hope that Matt Taibbi could complete the trifecta? Last week Rolling Stone published Taibbi’s latest frontal assault on his favorite vampire squid, “The People vs. Goldman Sachs.” Drawing heavily upon the 650-page report issued by Senator Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,” Taibbi made a powerful case for prosecuting the investment bank for fraud and its executives for perjury.

In other words, the bank needed to find suckers to buy as much of its risky inventory as possible. Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.

That should be illegal. But even if it is, and even if federal prosecutors finally get off their butts and start conducting their own investigations, Goldman Sachs may prove a little tougher to take down than McChrystal or Blankenship.

And Wall Street agrees. On the same day that the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced their subpoena, Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., released a note downplaying the likelihood of criminal prosecution.

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Department of Justice, which is reviewing a Senate subcommittee report that alleged Goldman Sachs misled clients before the financial crisis, will avoid jeopardizing the fifth- largest U.S. bank by assets because it’s viewed as “too big to fail,” Hintz wrote in note to clients today.

“If an alleged violation is identified during a Goldman investigation, we expect a reasoned response from the Justice Department,” Hintz wrote. “In a worst case environment, we would expect a ‘too big to fail’ bank such as Goldman to be offered a deferred-prosecution agreement, pay a significant fine and submit to a federal monitor in lieu of a criminal charge.”

That’s when you know you’ve really made it to the top of the thieving heap: When you’ve convinced the cops you can’t be taken down without the rest of the world collapsing with you.