Occupy Wall Street, Feb 29, 2012
Feb. 29, 2012
#M1GS
“On December 19th, 2011, Occupy Los Angeles General Assembly consented upon the following statement:
Occupy LA supports in principle a General Strike on May 1, 2012, for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace – and to recognize housing, education and health care as human rights, and calls for the building of a broad coalition to make that a reality.”
“Occupations across the world have made similar calls for a General Strike, or day of economic disruption, in direct response to Occupy Los Angeles, or through a synchronicity of thought, a buzzing hive mind that feels the need to express solidarity with movements and people throughout the world who honor May Day and see this years expression of that as our next major step.”
“Occupy Oakland Calls for Participation in a May 1, 2012 Global General Strike.
“May Day is an international holiday that commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, when Chicago police defending, as always, the interests of the 1% attacked and murdered workers participating in a general strike and demanding an 8-hour workday.
“On November 2 of last year, Occupy Oakland carried out the first General Strike in the US since the 1946 Oakland General Strike, shutting down the center of the city and blockading the Port of Oakland. We must re-imagine a general strike for an age where most workers do not belong to labor unions, and where most of us are fighting for the privilege to work rather than for marginal improvements in working conditions.”
by Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone, Feb. 28, 2012
“An internal DHS report [5-page pdf report here] entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street,” dated October of last year, opens with the observation that ‘mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas.’ While acknowledging the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of OWS, the report notes darkly that ‘large scale demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a significant challenge for law enforcement.’ ”
” ‘Social media and the organic emergence of online communities,’ the report notes, ‘have driven the rapid expansion of the OWS movement…While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests. Due to the location of the protests in major metropolitan areas, heightened and continuous situational awareness for security personnel across all CI sectors is encouraged.’ ”
“It’s never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to ‘control protestors’ – especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent.
“What’s more, there have been reports that Homeland Security
played an active rolein coordinating the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement last November – putting the federal government in the position of targeting its own citizens in the name of national security. There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for ‘continuous situational awareness’ and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.”
UPDATE: Feb. 24, 2012
by Adam Martin, The Atlantic Wire, Feb. 23, 2012
Excerpts:
“Occupy Wall Street is going on a press offensive to correct a round of stories on Wednesday that reported it was planning a national assembly for the summer, the latest example of the decentralized movement seeing its name used in ways its organizers don’t support.
“Occupy groups in New York and Philadelphia say they never ratified a plan by a group called the 99 Percent Working Group to hold an assembly of Occupy ‘delegates’ in Philadelphia on July 4. In fact, the Occupy groups say, they specifically denied the 99 Percent Declaration Working Group’s request for their approval.”
” On Thursday, the Occupy PR team in New York issued a statement disavowing the plan: ‘the 99% Declaration and its call for a “national general assembly” in Philadelphia in July is not affiliated with or endorsed by Occupy Wall Street, and the organizers’ plans blatantly contradict OWS’ stated principles.’
“It quoted a resolution passed by Occupy Philadelphia’s general assembly: ‘We do not support the 99% Declaration, its group, its website, its National GA and anything else associated with it.’ And it asked reporters to please check with Occupy Wall Street before running such stories. ”
by Associated Press, Washington Post,Feb. 23, 2012
Excerpts:
“Occupy Wall Street isn’t endorsing the Occupy conference being planned in Philadelphia because the idea wasn’t approved by its general assembly. An attorney who advised some Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last year said this week that his 99% Declaration Working Group is planning a national Occupy conference in Philadelphia over the Fourth of July. The attorney, Michael Pollok, said delegates will be elected from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories. ”
“But Han Shan, a member of the Occupy Wall Street public relations working group, said Thursday that the conference was mainly Pollok’s idea and that, while Occupy Wall Street may support some of its ideas, the group isn’t endorsing the conference itself. ‘We think it’s critically important to truly build consensus,’ Shan said. ‘This was not something that was built around consensus.’ ”
by Dale W. Eisinger, International Business Times, Feb. 14, 2012.
Excerpts:
“A Web site made public Tuesday morning by means of Reddit announced the planning of a democratically elected and nationally representative committee to assemble in Philadelphia during the week of July 4, 2012, to officially draft and present a petition for redress of grievances to the US government, as is protected under First Amendment rights.”
“Each of the 435 congressional districts is to elect two representatives. The rules of delegation are listed, in part, as such:
‘The office of Delegate shall be open to all United States citizens and lawful permanent residents who have attained the age of 18 years. No candidate for Delegate to the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY will be permitted to run on a party line or use any party label while running for or serving as a Delegate. No candidate or Delegate may take private money from any source except for reasonable gifts to fund his or her trip to the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY in Philadelphia.
No politician holding elected or appointed office at the time of the Delegate election, including members of Congress, are eligible to run for or sit as a Delegate to the National General Assembly.’ The page states each district will elect one male and one female delegate. ”
“Though the page was posted to Reddit only Tuesday morning, the www.the-99-declaration.org/ site has been registered for six weeks. ”
crooksandliars.com/bluegal, credit:@ChazFrench
Bill of Rights: Amendment I: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
23 & Bway, Jan 28, 2012, photo by Steve Rhodes
UPDATE: FEB 16, 2012
Activists and Anarchists Speak for Themselves at Occupy Oakland, by Susie Cagle, indybay.org, Feb. 10, 2012
Excerpts:
“Compared to the rest of the country, Occupy Oakland is still on fire. January 28 was not supposed to turn out the way it did. After Occupy Oakland failed to occupy its first two targeted buildings and had a short-lived street battle in front of the Oakland Museum, police in riot gear contained the march of nearly 1,000 in a public park. There was a dispersal order, but no means of escape. Protesters with shields attempted to push the police line, which responded with several volleys of tear gas into the crowd, still trapped. Instead of enduring the gas, the crowd pulled down chain-link fencing that separated them from the street and safety.”
“…Chris Hedges’ ‘Black Bloc’ takedown is only the most recent in a series of critiques bashing anarchists and “diversity of tactics” within the national Occupy movement since January 28th’s fog of tear gas has dissipated. While previous criticisms came from the right or center of the political spectrum, these perspectives are arising from the left and mainly from journalists who have not been in the field to witness these tactics in action and within context.”
“…In May of 2010, amid global financial faltering, Hedges celebrated the Greek insurrection:
‘They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare – the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat.’
“…But those strikes, riots and shut-downs in America are troubling to Hedges and other Occupy Oakland critics on the left. These critics focus on property destruction – such as the tearing down of those fences on January 28 – by perceived black bloc “hooligans” as a discrediting force in the movement, even while they understand the role of focused property destruction at, say, the Boston Tea Party, or in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s struggle against EGT in Longview, Washington.”
“…The ‘local coffee shop’ vandalism Hedges contends was committed by black bloc was in fact one window of a corporate coffee chain smashed in that post-strike fog of war – and by someone not wearing a mask, not wearing black. The people who broke into City Hall on January 28, and many of those who destroyed property there, were also largely unmasked. And both of these acts came immediately after, as in within minutes of, violent mass kettling and arrest actions.”
“…when Hedges and other critics pointed to Occupy Oakland’s failures on January 28, they were not talking about black bloc – those torn fences and an autonomous and unfocused city hall melee were the only property destruction Oakland saw that day. No, they mean Occupy protesters who choose to stand up to the police. And for Hedges and others on the left hoping Occupy makes strides toward national change, standing up to the police is a public relations liability and those who do it should be ‘purged’ from the movement – an arguably violent claim in and of itself.”
“…The buildings Occupy Oakland marched toward were not targeted for destruction, but for squatting, for organization and for political and community building. And the protesters who came armed with plastic, wood and metal shields, who both moved on and defended others from the police, were not a bloc, were not dressed in black and did not move as one unit.”
“…As one anarchist occupier said at a general assembly after November 2, ‘It’s a lot more violent to foreclose on somebody and throw them out of a house than throw a rock through a window’…That institutionalized violence against people, especially people in Oakland, is something these critics gloss over. Some in Occupy Oakland call a consistent pacifist protest approach a ‘position of privilege’- a position taken by those who have not been in a situation where they have needed to defend themselves against violence, be it economic, physical or otherwise.”
“…’A riot is the language of the unheard,’ said Martin Luther King. And Oakland is a city of the unheard, a city of tremendous institutionalized violence, a city of empty and blighted bank-owned homes, a city that saw riots and mass arrests just a year ago in response to police brutality, all before Occupy has a name or public face.
“Regardless of where that riotous energy is focused next, Hedges and others would be well served to spend some time in Oakland and its occupation in order to better cover it.”
UPDATE: Feb. 15, 2012
by Chris Hedges, truthdig.com, Feb. 13, 2012
There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations—the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts—to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM—Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement—or front groups acting in the name of the movement—to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process.
Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily about, in the old cliché, hearts and minds. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar to those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. These operatives are, in fact, often the same people. The state has expended external resources to break the movement. It is reasonable to assume it has expended internal resources to break the movement.
The security and surveillance state has a vast arsenal and array of tools at its disposal. It operates in secret. It dissembles and lies. It hides behind phony organizations and individuals who use false histories and false names. It has millions of dollars to spend, the capacity to deny not only its activities but also its existence. Its physical assets honeycomb the country. It can wiretap, eavesdrop and monitor every form of communication. It can hire informants, send in clandestine agents, recruit members within the movement by offering legal immunity, churn out a steady stream of divisive propaganda and amass huge databases and clandestine operations centers. And it is authorized to use deadly force.
How do we fight back? We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we will unleash widespread paranoia and fracture the movement. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons.
All we have, as Vaclav Havel writes, is our own powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The survival of the movement depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. This permits us, as Havel puts it in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and lives in deceit.
Havel, who would later become the first president of the Czech Republic, in the essay writes a reflection on the mind of a greengrocer who, as instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World Unite!” The poster is displayed partly out of habit, partly because everyone else does it, and partly out of fear of the consequences for not following the rules. The greengrocer would not, Havel writes, display a poster saying: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” And here is the difference between the terror of a Josef Stalin or an Adolf Hitler and the collective charade between the rulers and the ruled that by the 1970s had gripped Czechoslovakia.
“Imagine,” Havel writes, “that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.”
This attempt to “live within the truth” brings with it ostracism and retribution. Punishment is imposed in bankrupt systems because of the necessity for compliance, not out of any real conviction. And the real crime committed is not the crime of speaking out or defying the rules, but the crime of exposing the charade.
“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such, he has exposed it as a mere game,” Havel says of his greengrocer. “He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”
Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or who do not “live in truth,” inevitably become compromised. In Havel’s words, they “are the system.” The Occupy movement, by naming corporate power and refusing to compromise with it, by forming alternative systems of community and society, embodies Havel’s call to “live in truth.” It does not appeal to the systems of control, and for this reason it is a genuine threat to the corporate state.
Movements that call on followers to “live in truth” do not always succeed. They failed in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, triggering armed insurgencies and blood-drenched civil wars. They have failed so far in Iran, the Israeli-occupied territories and Syria. China has a movement modeled after Havel’s Charter 77 called Charter 08. But the Chinese opposition to the state has been effectively suppressed, even though its principal author, Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year prison term for “incitement of subversion of state power,” was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Power elites who stubbornly refuse to heed popular will and resort to harsher and harsher forms of state control can easily provoke counterviolence. The first Palestinian uprising, which lasted from 1987 to 1992, saw crowds of demonstrators throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, but it was largely a nonviolent movement. The second uprising, or intifada, which erupted in 2000 and endured for five years, with armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, was not. History is dotted with brutal fratricides spawned by calcified and repressive elites who ignored peaceful protest. And even when nonviolent movements do succeed, it is impossible to predict when they will spawn an uprising or how long the process will take. As Timothy Garton Ash noted about Eastern Europe’s revolutions of the late 20th century, in Poland the revolt took 10 years, in East Germany 10 weeks, in Czechoslovakia 10 days.
Occupy’s most powerful asset is that it articulates this truth. And this truth is understood by the mainstream, the 99 percent. If the movement is severed from the mainstream, which I expect is the primary goal of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, it will be crippled and easily contained. Other, more militant groups may rise and even flourish, but if the Occupy movement is to retain the majority it will have to fight within self-imposed limitations of nonviolence.
I do not know if it will succeed. If it does not ,then I fear we will see the classical forms of violent protest that are used by an enraged and frustrated populace; for me such a turn to violence, while understandable, is always tragic. Violence is a poison, even when it is ingested in a supposedly just cause. It contaminates all who use it. I watched this poison work on repressors and the repressed from Latin America to the Middle East to the Balkans. I am not a pacifist. I know there are limits. But I desperately want to avoid going there.
“We would not have a movement if violence or property damage were used from the outset,” Kevin Zeese, one of the first activists to call for an Occupy movement, told me. “People are not drawn to violent movement. Such tactics will shrink rather than expand our base of support. Property damage justifies police violence to many Americans. There is a wide range of diversity of tactics within a nonviolent strategy. Disciplined nonviolence is often more difficult because anger and emotion lead people to want to strike back at the police when they are violent, but disciplined nonviolence is the tactic that is most effective against the violence of the state.”
The organizer Lisa Fithian is an author of one of the most concise arguments for nonviolence, “Open Letter to the Occupy Movement: Why We Need Agreements.” The essay points out that without agreements that enshrine nonviolence, “the young [are privileged] over the old, the loud voices over the soft, the fast over the slow, the able-bodied over those with disabilities, the citizen over the immigrant, white folks over people of color, those who can do damage and flee the scene over those who are left to face the consequences.”
“ ‘Diversity of tactics’ becomes an easy way to avoid wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability,” Fithian and two other authors write of the slogan used by the Black Bloc anarchists. “It lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for ‘anything goes,’ and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions.”
“The Occupy movement includes people from a broad diversity of backgrounds, life experiences and political philosophies,” the article goes on. “Some of us want to reform the system and some of us want to tear it down and replace it with something better. Our one great point of agreement is our call for transparency and accountability. We stand against the corrupt institutions that broker power behind closed doors. We call to account the financial manipulators that have bilked billions out of the poor and the middle classes.
“Just as we call for accountability and transparency, we ourselves must be accountable and transparent,” the authors write. “Some tactics are incompatible with those goals, even if in other situations they might be useful, honorable or appropriate. We can’t be transparent behind masks. We can’t be accountable for actions we run away from. We can’t maintain the security culture necessary for planning and carrying out attacks on property and also maintain the openness that can continue to invite in a true diversity of new people. We can’t make alliances with groups from impacted communities, such as immigrants, if we can’t make agreements about what tactics we will employ in any given action.”
We must assume we are targets. And we must fight back by relying on our strength, which in the great paradox of resistance movements is embodied in our weakness. This does not mean we will avoid being repressed or persecuted. It will not keep us safe from slander, lies or jail. But it does offer the capacity to create internal divisions in the apparatus of the oppressors rather than permit the oppressors to create internal divisions within the movement. Divided loyalties create paralysis. And it is our job to paralyze them, not allow them to paralyze us.
By Chris Hedges, truthdig.com, Feb 6, 2012
Excerpts:
The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.
The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.
Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas.
“The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement,” the writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I reached him by phone in California. “If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard…It is a lot easier to pick up a rock and throw it through the nearest window than it is to organize, or at least figure out which window you should throw a rock through if you are going to throw a rock. A lot of it is laziness.”
There is a word for this—“criminal.”
The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal. It taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness.
The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. It can use the Black Bloc’s confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished. If we become isolated we can be crushed. The arrests last weekend in Oakland of more than 400 protesters, some of whom had thrown rocks, carried homemade shields and rolled barricades, are an indication of the scale of escalating repression and a failure to remain a unified, nonviolent opposition.
This is a struggle to win the hearts and minds of the wider public and those within the structures of power (including the police) who are possessed of a conscience. It is not a war. Nonviolent movements, on some level, embrace police brutality. The continuing attempt by the state to crush peaceful protesters who call for simple acts of justice delegitimizes the power elite. It prompts a passive population to respond. It brings some within the structures of power to our side and creates internal divisions that will lead to paralysis within the network of authority. Martin Luther King kept holding marches in Birmingham because he knew Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor was a thug who would overreact.
The Black Bloc’s thought-terminating cliché of “diversity of tactics” in the end opens the way for hundreds or thousands of peaceful marchers to be discredited by a handful of hooligans. The state could not be happier. It is a safe bet that among Black Bloc groups in cities such as Oakland are agents provocateurs spurring them on to more mayhem. But with or without police infiltration the Black Bloc is serving the interests of the 1 percent. These anarchists represent no one but themselves. Those in Oakland, although most are white and many are not from the city, arrogantly dismiss Oakland’s African-American leaders, who, along with other local community organizers, should be determining the forms of resistance.
The explosive rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement came when a few women, trapped behind orange mesh netting, were pepper-sprayed by NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. The violence and cruelty of the state were exposed. And the Occupy movement, through its steadfast refusal to respond to police provocation, resonated across the country. Losing this moral authority, this ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement. It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want.
photo by Eric Arnold, Oakland, CA, January 28, 2012
Summary: We were jailed for marching. Some were jailed for walking home from the grocery store. We were denied medication, sleep, blankets, time, sanitation, and given bologne sandwiches for breakfast lunch and dinner even though many are vegetarians or could not eat that meat for religious reasons. Some were not booked for 40 hours, meaning we did not exist and some are still in jail and need bail money.
We were put in overcrowded concrete rooms with bright flourescent light and no place to lay down and left there for days. We could have been at Guantanamo, and this could have been you, your child, your sister or your brother. The 1% is consolidating its power against the dissent because their power and wealth is unsustainable. They would rather jail you then make any change. This is what the NDAA is about and we need everyone to stand up now.
Occupy Oakland and the hundreds who were arrested are peaceful people demonstrating for an equitable system. I know because I was in jail with them. Some are still being held over fifty hours later. We were cornered at the side of the YMCA by violent police officers simply for marching against homelessness and the need for empty buildings to be used to house people. We were doing nothing but marching. In fact, I was on rollerblades. There was no dispersal order.
But more importantly, we wanted to disperse but anyone who tried to leave was beaten with batons. We were smooshed into a corner by the police. We are teachers, students, social workers, non-profit workers, from all sectors of society, from ages 17 to at least 60 plus. Some were not even part of the protest, but were walking home from the grocery store. It could have been you, it could have been your child, your sister, your brother.
Everyone was held at least twelve hours but many of us were held over 40 hours without being booked, in deplorable conditions. Our names were not put into the system during these hours, so we did not exist. The media reported that there would be mass arrests in Oakland before the January 28th actions even started. People were arrested for being protesters, not for violating any law. This was planned and coordinated in advance, most likely with the assistance of Homeland Security.
We sat in concrete cold rooms with bright fluorescent light shining 24 hours a day, no blanket, no cot, no place to lay down. The rooms were glorified bathrooms where you had to pee or poo in front of all the 5 to 25 other cellmates in your room and any officers or janitors who walked passed and looked through the window, or unlocked the door. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, when sporadically brought, were bologna sandwiches, even though many of us are vegetarian or come from religions that cannot eat that meat, or meat at all.
There was no garbage can or bag so the pile of leftover garbage, from used maxi-pads (which were sporadically provided) to uneaten bologna and the plastic and cardboard the unedible food was brought in, piled up in the corner. We were basically living in a bathroom filled with garbage. We were denied clocks, watches, paper, pens, phone calls (except for a few people who asked the right guard at the right time for their phone call) and most importantly medicine.
Many needed medications, some every 3 to 4 hours, and when I was released they were still denied it for over 36 hours, and they were going into withdrawal. Some are still there and need bail money. They are being charged with felonies simply for trying to find a way to disperse by entering an open door to find an exit because police were cornering us and batoning people who tried to leave. When they finally started booking us for release from the jail, some were sent back into their cells because the booking officer did not like them.
And there are reports that some were beaten simply for saying something an officer did not like. We were held in zip tie handcuffs for hours in buses with cages before we arrived at the jail. Some people’s arms were twisted into the zip ties nearly cutting off their circulation, yet the police officers ignored their cries of pain and refused to loosen the hand ties. One nineteen year-old in my cell had her zip ties so tight that when they were cut off by the officer they made a gash in her wrist that bled profusely.
As to the so called “violence” by occupiers at City Hall, these acts occurred after Occupiers that escaped witnessed their friends, who were part of a peaceful march, being beaten with batons and cornered by police. The media, and even progressive media, focusing on a few acts of vandalism which happened in a desperate response to actual violence committed by the police against peaceful protestors, and obviously condoned by the Mayor, is a disgrace and misses the point.
We could just as easily have been at Guantanamo. This is for real! Economic conditions are worsening, the powers that be are worried about dissent growing, and they are practicing. The public needs to stand up against it now, or else the time will come that it will be you swept off the street and imprisoned anonymously. This is about the 1% holding on to their wealth at the expense of the 99%. They do not want to give up any of their excessive wealth, control or privileges, yet it is unsustainable. So they are tightening a system that will quell all dissent through their ownership of the media, the politicians, the prisons, and the courts.
The NDAA (the National Defense Authorization Act), the Patriot Act and the AETA (Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act) are all examples of the 1% re-writing and enacting laws to legalize suppression of dissent to protect corporations, whose interests are limited to corporate profits. This is one of the first things Hitler did when he came to power. And most Germans turned their heads. It cannot be just a few thousand people in each city standing up to this. This needs to be millions.
Join us now or forever hold your peace when they come for you or your child for requesting a basic right or reporting a violation of someone or a community’s rights. We are at a crossroads, do you want to continue listening to the mainstream media that reports corporate interests or will you please start reading alternative people-based media to hear truth so you will stand up before it’s too late? We must salvage anything that’s left of democracy, the Constitution, and the Earth that feeds and clothes us, and that provides the oxygen we breathe and the water we drink.
That is ultimately what our system is destroying in its emphasis on immediate consumption and production for the benefit of the 1% and their multiple mansions and airplanes. All that we consume and produce ultimately comes from the limited resources of the Earth. Stand up now or your children will have nothing to look forward to except prison camps, asthma, and chemicals. Take the time to educate, spread the word, and march with us. This can actually be more entertaining then your weekend movie, television shows, or shopping trips. Let’s get together, get to know our communities and stand up for a peaceful just system at the same time.
http://youtu.be/wTum1mSpkK8
As a reminder, there are 3 official strike stations that Occupy Oakland will help facilitate. The strike stations are:
Press Release California Nurses Association/National Nurses United
LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the 
