Occupy Oakland

RT America's The Alyona Show has had a reporter on the scene at Occupy Oakland; they had the following report from Monday 11/14/2011, Occupy Oakland Evicted:



Dan Siegel talks about Occupy Oakland in an appearance with Keith Olbermann on Current TV's Countdown 11/15/2011, Occupy Oakland: Dan Siegel, why he resigned as advisor to Mayor Quan:



Salon's Joan Walsh has been trying to be analytical and fair, though it's also clear that she's worried about backlash from Sarah Palin's Real Americans. She has what seems like a solid report in On the eve of destruction 11/14/2011.

Both reports talk about the discussion over tactics, including the use of violence against property.

Jonathan Simon at his Governing Through Crime blog, Governing the Occupy Movement through Crime 11/15/2011 makes an important point about how a shooting incident was used by Oakland officials as a main justification for clearing the primary Occupy Oakland encampment downtown. Although those involved in the shooting were hanging around the encampment and may have been staying there, it's not clear whether they were actively involved in the protest. Simon writes:

The gist of the argument behind this blog, and the book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear,is that political leaders facing a chronic legitimacy deficit since the late 1960s have frequently used protecting citizens from crime as the least problematic way of justifying the exercise of power.

In Oakland this played out in almost comic precision. Hemmoraging legitimacy after first clearing the plaza in a violent police sweep and then letting the Occupy encampment be reestablished Mayor Jean Quan seemed paralyzed with indecision about what to do about the camp until a murder on the periphery of the encampment last week gave her a crime cover. Having supported the goals of the occupation and accepted encampment as a protest tactic the Mayor now found an imperative requiring the preventive clearing of the site (read the full story in the SFChron here):

"The encampment became a place where we had repeated violence and, this week, a murder. We had to bring the camp to an end before more people were hurt."

I'll add here that I went down to the Occupy Oakland site on Saturday morning of Nov. 5. Downtown Oakland, like most big city downtowns, is a mixture of people on a normal day. There are a lot of office workers and medical people in the area. There's a large Kaiser Permanente facility there and a lot of offices, restaurants and shops in the vicinity of City Hall, where Occupy Oakland camped. There are some buildings that have been recently built or renovated and others that are more run-down. There are also a fair amount of homeless or transients in the area. On a normal day, it's not a particularly unsafe place to be, though in any city you have to always be aware of the surroundings, especially after dark.

When I walked around the Occupy Oakland encampment, it was midmorning, and a lot of people seemed to be waking up and getting something for breakfast and starting the day. There was a spirited protest mini-rally at a Wells Fargo bank branch a block or so away. There were a few people who I guessed may have been homeless or beggars or both hanging around the camp, which didn't surprise me, but not a lot. It wasn't like a camping site at a state park. But it didn't strike me as especially grungy.

Digby tweeted on Tuesday, "Many readers like posts that focus on defecation of #OWS protesters 2 exclusion of all else/#bizarrerightwingfetish". When I was at the Occupy Oakland camp, there seemed to be plenty of Porta-Potties available. And I didn't see or smell nasty stuff. Sorry to disappoint FOX News fans.

My general impression of downtown Oakland is consistent with what Simon observes here:

While the details of the murder investigation are unknown to me, there is little reason to believe from what we know thus far that the encampment created a context that made such a killing more likely. Far from it. As media attention to the encampment has disclosed to many casual observers, Oakland has loads of homeless men, many of them battling symptoms of mental illness, life long drug abuse, and the soul destroying impact of mass incarceration. The city also has lots of young men punished and pushed out of schools and toward jail (read Victor Rios' superb book Punished for more on that) whose search for dignity takes them into deadly games of gang competition and related honor violence. These troubled populations, frequently churned by law enforcement, prison, and parole, has been a source of crime and insecurity in Oakland for decades; Occupy Oakland didn't bring it there, and based on published reports did not make it worst.

Joan Walsh's article gives a good sense, I think, of how a disparate protest movement would inevitably encounter problems with homeless people and drug dealers and various marginal urban dwellers, especially in a setting like downtown Oakland. The occupying of this Occupy movement doesn't seem likely to turn into anything like the squatter movement in Germany in the 1970s. So there would be some kind of natural limit on this phase of it, even in the absence of police misconduct.

But the Occupy movement became a genuinely "democratic moment". It changed the national political dialogue on the depression and exposed some rotting and rotten parts of our political system in an important way.

One of the things the Occupy movement has highlighted is the increasing militarization of the police. Digby writes about that in Militarizing the Police: How the Drug War and 9/11 Led to Battle-Dressed Cops Cracking Down on Peaceful Protests Alternet 11/14/2011. So does Glenn Greenwald in A police raid suffused with symbolism Salon 11/15/2011.

Tags: occupy oakland, occupy oakland

Occupy Oakland: actual journalism, and on TV even!

Ana Kasparian of Current TV's The Young Turks did some actual reporting on the violence that broke out early Thursday morning Nov. 3, Occupy Oakland Riot - Ana Reports for The Young Turks 11/03/2011:



This strikes me as really decent journalism, though The Young Turks definitely have a partisan/ideological orientation. As Jay Rosen has been preaching for years, you don't have to strike a view-from-nowhere pose to do solid, professional reporting.

Ana's report provides more evidence of what I suspected when I first heard about the early-morning ruckus. Which is that the organized vandalism seems to have mostly been the work of the Bay Area anarchists who tend to use the occasion of big demonstrations to confront police and generally make a dramatic stir.

The Occupy Oakland protests and the anarchists have different political goals, which lead them to different strategies. Whatever short-term political goals the anarchists hope to achieve, they see rowdy confrontations with police and window-smashing vandalism as the way to forward them.

Occupy Oakland, though, achieved something on Wednesday that the Bay Area anarchists can only dream of doing: they successfully staged an actual general strike, the most significant part of which was that the ILWU dockworkers participated and shut down the Port of Oakland, one of the largest ports on the West Coast. That's power. You don't need to smash windows when you can do what Occupy Oakland did on Wednesday.

A word of not-unfriendly advice to local anarchists: if you're going to be pick a group to screw up the political impact of their strikes and demonstrations, the ILWU dockworkers are really not the best first choice of people to piss off. I'm just saying.

Tags: occupy oakland

Occupy Oakland and its general strike

With the eyes of the world on Oakland yesterday, the violent clashes of the night of 11/02 and the early morning of 11/03 will get disproportionate attention: Kristin Bender et al, Occupy Oakland demonstrators clash with police, block Port Oakland Tribune 11/03/2011.

That shouldn't detract from the real accomplishment of Occupy Oakland on Wednesday the 2nd (although it will). Diane Sweet gives a brief report on the day's events in Occupy Oakland Shuts Down City C&L 11/03/2011. Pulling off a one-day general strike really is quite an accomplishment. The members of the ILWU (International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Union) did an informal walkout, though it's a safe guess that the union leadership wasn't bothered by that though technically they didn't endorse the action, probably for legal and contractual reasons.

Cenk Uygur reports on the port shutdown in Occupy Oakland Organizer on Blocking the Oakland Port The Young Turks YouTube date 10/03/2011:



This is a report on the port shutdown from Aljazeera English, Protesters shut down huge Oakland port in US 11/02/2011:



Here is a PBS Newshour report from during the day of 11/02/2011, Occupy Oakland Movement Tries to Flex Muscle With General Strike:



This comment from PBS reporter Spencer Michels is an appropriate observation:

An observation: As controversial as the activities of Occupy Oakland are, very few people, organizations or politicians have spoken out against the principles of this demonstration.

The strike and the encampment have attracted a mixed group of protesters and denizens of the community. Although the group claims it has no leaders, participants gather often for planning meetings, where they work out the logistics of a city hall camp-in.

Local news report video from KTVU TV: OAKLAND: Occupy Oakland protests erupts into violence

This is a segment related to Occupy Oakland from Keith Olbermann's Countdown (apparently from 10/02/2011; YouTube date 11/03/2011), OWS: Joshua Shepherd links vets' issues with larger movement:



C&L has set up a section of their blog devoted to Occupy America.

I'll say several things here, all of which can be true at the same time: the more violent (starting fires) aspect of the protest was not the result or the goal of the main Occupy Oakland protest group - in fact, the latter tried to discourage such actions; the violence does reflect in part the frustration and anger many people feel not only against Wall Street but specifically against the misconduct of Oakland police last week; critics will use the violent aspects to try to discredit the protests more generally; the Bay Area has some actual anarchist types around who look for opportunities to stage dramatic scenes; the authorities at all levels are using spies and provocateurs at a level not seen since the COINTELPRO program and probably on a much greater scale than even that; some of the more violent individuals in Oakland Wednesday night were almost certainly police provocateurs of some kind.

Pure protest movements exist only in the minds of their critics. People who want to understand what they are really about have to look at the whole picture. Grownups can look at the main thrust of the 99% protest of the Occupy movement and see that Ron Paul crackpots and general sleazebags try to glom onto it for one reason or the other. The Occupy movement has to deal with those as part of the efforts of those acting on behalf of the 1% to discredit their movement. Since the Occupy movement is challenging the power of organized money, they can't count on the favorable press or the Koch brothers-type financing that the Tea Party could.

Given all those factors, I'm frankly not worrying personally about the occasional paint-ball splattering a public building or people pounding on ATMs during a large demonstration. The main crowd in the Occupy Oakland protest apparently opposed those actions on Wednesday and that's good thinking on their part. But if you're an outside observer who's too pure to support anything about any movement that has anything like that happening at its demonstrations, then forget about protesting anything substantive. Get yourself a funny Colonial costume and join the Tea Party.

Or, if you really like sounding "left", you can join up with some Trotskyist sect. They are the people who support revolution everywhere except where one is going on. The perfect environment for someone who want to be "left" but doesn't want to do anything that might actually discomfort the most comfortable.

There is an Occupy Oakland website.

Tags: occupy oakland, occupy wall street