American Leftist

Tear Gas, Flash Grenades, Rubber Bullets and Mass Arrests Used Against Occupy Oakland

2012-01-28T22:42:00.011-05:00

UPDATE (11:05 PM PST): There is a report of approximately 300 arrests today in Oakland.

INITIAL POST:

I was out all day, and don't know how things got to this point. At the time of this post, 7:30 PM PST, the Oakland Police Department is in the process of arresting about 100 people that have been kettled in front of the YMCA building in the downtown area near Oscar Grant Plaza. Apparently, there were confrontations earlier in the day that resulted in the police using tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades on protesters. All I know is that Occupy Oakland had previously announced plans to take over an abandoned building today and use it for housing and the provision of services, a building that turned out to be the Kaiser Civic Auditorium near Lake Merritt. For updates and links to livestreams and ustreams, use the hashtag #Occupy Oakland.

Franz Walsch Takes the Fall at firedoglake

2012-01-27T16:30:00.016-05:00

As some of the longtime visitors to this blog know, I am a fan of the films of the 1970s and early 1980s German director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder aspired to show us the world as it is in order to encourage us to create a better one. He was personally inspired by his identification with the character of Franz Biberkopf in Alfred Doblin's 1920s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Biberkopf was a thief, a murderer and a pimp, but he, and those with whom he lived, also represented the experience of the German lumpenproletariat during a period of rapid urbanization and extreme poverty during the Weimar era. Fassbinder said that, upon reading Alexanderplatz as a teenager, he felt as if his personal experience had already been written by Doblin. He eventually directed a TV series based upon the novel in 1980.

Prior to that time, Biberkopf allegorically appears in a number of Fassbinder's films as the character Franz Walsch, usually performed by Fassbinder himself, as in his debut film, Love is Colder than Death, with the last name being an homage to one of Fassbinder's favorite American directors, Raoul Walsh. One of the identifying characteristics of this character is his naivete, which results in him invariably being the fall guy in the classic film noir sense. After being reluctantly persuaded by one of my Occupy guests on KDVS last October, Mary McCurnin, to move beyond being a lurker at firedoglake and become a member, so that I could post comments and, possibly even diary entries, I took the name of Franz Biberkopf. I selected it to identify with the downtrodden who struggle through the perils of life, having forgotten the more specific noirish implications of it. I intended to communicate with others through comments and a stray diary entry here and there about Occupy as firedoglake has been a strong supporter of it.

Unfortunately, my apprehension about becoming a member of firedoglake was confirmed in the most incredibly surreal way. On Monday, Kevin Gosztola, a person who I have interviewed on KDVS as well, posted about his visit to Occupy Buffalo. He briefly addressed how Occupy Buffalo deals the question of admitting the homeless. As Franz Biberkopf, I commented upon it by responding specifically to a comment by Kevin, and, apparently, as you can see if you scroll down the post and peruse the comments, Jane Hamsher, the founder of firedoglake, wasn't too pleased with what I had to say, although I didn't understand the intensity of her displeasure at the time. Yesterday, Gosztola discussed the issue of Occupy Buffalo and the homeless in more depth, and I commented again despite an initial inclination not to do so because I felt an obligation to engage Gosztola's willlingness to continue to address the subject.

Of course, that was a mistake, similar to the kinds of mistake the allegorical Franz makes in Fassbinder's films, assuming the kind hearted good nature of those around him. Here is what transpired as Hamsher proceeded to imply that I am either an employee of the Department of Homeland Security or sympathetic to it:

Franz Biberkopf January 26th, 2012 at 1:44 pm 5
In response to CelestialNavigation @ 3

Yes, the challenge is to avoid considering the homeless as a monolithic group identified by a set of dysfunctional behaviors, which it appears that those involved in Occupy Buffalo does. I do, think, however, that John’s contrast between those who sleep outside as a statement against the government and the homeless who see it just personally advantageous is a bit reductionist. No one, including the homeless, should personally exploit the movement, but there has to be a point of contact that enables those in the movement to persuade others to embrace it and take responsibility for it as well, as best they can. Otherwise, you run the risk of that old left sectarian thing where you can’t even walk through the door unless you possess a completely realized political consciousness congruent with the movement. Think about this in terms of activism outside of Occupy. You know someone who has some personal problems, but is willing to hand out flyers or make some phone calls a few hours a week, and has the capability to do these limited tasks. Do you say, no thanks, or work with them as they are? Of course, there are some people with such difficulties that an occupation lacks the resources to deal with them and offer them the opportunity to participate, and they must regrettably be excluded. The sad reality is, as you observe, that the victims of this social order respond to that victimization in self-destructive ways, and this presents unique problems for any social movement that seeks to address it.

Jane Hamsher January 26th, 2012 at 1:54 pm 7
In response to Franz Biberkopf @ 5

I think it’s so great you’re out there putting yourself on the line every night like the people in Occupy Buffalo and show up here to give us the benefit of what you have learned from dealing with these same problems directly, and not some failed middle-aged blow-hard armchair activist who shows up here demanding that others expose themselves to danger for your philosophical beliefs.

What occupation do you live in that allows so much access to electrical power during the day? And what has your General Assembly done to deal with your homeless issues?

I know that the #1 way that government operatives undermine the occupations is to send people out to infiltrate them and demand that they take on more problems than they can handle by working their liberal guilt and castigating them for being insufficiently compassionate when they take steps to protect themselves — usually from the same compassionate agencies that are pouring violent, mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people into the camps and feeding them a steady diet of drugs and alcohol to exacerbate their problems.

What occupation did you say you were with again?

Jane Hamsher January 26th, 2012 at 2:04 pm 8
Hey you two have a real consistent tag-team going, Franz and Celestial. It’s great that both of you always show up to engage in a back-and-fort every time the subject of the homeless at occupations comes up, to reinforce just how cruel, selfish, short-sighted and insufficiently liberal the people who are out there in the occupation camps are when they take steps to protect themselves from the tactics of professional operatives who are exploiting the homeless. Which you both mis-characterize in the same (equally uncharitable) way.

Occupy Buffalo has become a rich target for government operatives because they have adopted tactics that keep infiltrators from working their game plan there as successfully as they have other places.

Do you work for Homeland Security, or just engage in their their tactics out of personal belief?

Franz Biberkopf January 26th, 2012 at 2:31 pm 9
I really don’t understand your hostility, because I’m not even sure that we disagree about very much. And, to malign me as a Homeland Security operative . . . well, I’m speechless and that doesn’t happen very often. After I interviewed her last October about Occupy Sacramento, Mary McCurnin suggested that I sign up to post comments here after I told her that I had lurked here for years. Not because I’m Homeland Security, mind you, but because I actually appreciate what you and the other people here have done. Anyway, that was apparently a mistake. I even made a small contribution to the site the other day and a larger one to the Occupy Supply fund. I’m no enemy or agent provocateur.

Needless to say, I wouldn't know where to begin to deconstruct Hamsher's comments, except to note the obvious, as I did, that they were indicative of an intensity of hostility that was incomprehensible. If you think that was the end of it, guess again, as Hamsher thereafter proceeded to abandon her claim that I am aligned with or sympathetic to DHS and substitute another one to the effect that I am part of a K Street, corporate lobby effort to disrupt Occupy Buffalo and firedoglake:

Jane Hamsher January 26th, 2012 at 11:39 pm 45
In response to Franz Biberkopf @ 9

I really don’t understand your hostility, because I’m not even sure that we disagree about very much.

That’s the exact thing they train the DLC guys to say to us when they debate us. It’s a canned response: “Try to sound reasonable and emphasize your similarities; characterize them as hysterical, out of control, extreme and angry for not acknowledging how alike you are.” Standard tactic for appropriating populist credibility on behalf of an elitist agenda.

It’s also the second time you’ve used that exact phrase. Perhaps it’s your first time at the rodeo?

FDL has been vigilant about keeping the place free of obvious political and corporate operatives (and their contractors) by booting people who show up and exhibit the warning signs. Where other sites have become overrun with propaganda-pushing trolls who tag-team messaging using virtual counterinsurgency tactics (“let the enemy know you care about them and you’re on their side”), FDL has adopted a zero tolerance policy when the warning lights go off.

You Mr. Franz are flashing bright fuschia, and I frankly don’t care if you’re working for STRATFOR or NMS or Palantir or Berico or it’s just a happy coincidence that you follow their script. You’re here for the second time to curl your lip and disrespect Occupy Buffalo for adopting tactics that protect them from such infiltration, and only dialed it back when you realized you were on thin ice.

This is your second warning. If you would like us to agree on something, I suggest the definition of zero tolerance.

Franz Biberkopf January 27th, 2012 at 1:31 am 46
In response to Jane Hamsher @ 45

This is so totally off base that it’s comical. But if you want to look into it, here’s my background. My name is Richard Estes, and I live in Sacramento, California. I have hosted a public affairs program on KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis since 1998, and interviewed a lot of people associated with progressive, liberal and left issues over the years. All on my own time, as KDVS is a volunteer, student and community run radio station. From firedoglake, I have interviewed Jon Walker and Mike Ross, and, more recently, Kevin Gosztola and Mary McCurnin in relation to Occupy, as well as occupiers and ustreamers from Occupy Sacramento, Occupy Oakland and Occupy SF. You can listen to me over the Net at http://www.kdvs.org at 5pm tomorrow when I interview a couple of people from Occupy SF as well as Jorge Mariscal of Project YANO, a counter-recruitment effort among people of color in San Diego. I have also participated in Occupy events whenever possible (you can go look up my post at the Occupy Oakland port shutdown if you are so inclined). If you take the time to check out my profile, you will see that I have a blog, http://www.amleft.blogspot.com

You might not agree with what I say there, but that’s not the point, I just mention it as yet another indication that I’m not a corporate shill. I just write what I really believe, and encourage the few people that visit to engage with it. I have also contributed to Occupy Supply as I said (out of my own pocket, no less), you can check with Brian on that, and even donated to firedoglake itself. Sometimes, you can just take what people say at face value, as if they really mean it, and not incorporate it into some sort of conspiracy theory. My e-mail address can also be found at my profile, and you can confirm what I say by using it if, again, you are so inclined. Anyway, here it is: restes1960@yahoo.com

On my end, I will give some thought about how I ended up sounding like a K Street corporate lobby firm. That’s definitely not my intention.

Poor Franz, always the fall guy. Circulating in shark-like waters where the Department of Homeland Security and K Street lobbyists are conspiring to destroy Occupy and firedoglake, Franz takes the fall for their crimes instead of for the leftist ones that he committed. So far, I haven't heard anything more about it, and have sent an instruction to firedoglake for assistance in closing my member account.

The 2012 Election and the Evolution of Political Protest

2012-01-26T17:07:00.012-05:00

One of the most striking aspects of the 2012 electoral process is the fact that much of the public has realized that it has nothing to do with real issues of concern. It is now generally recognized as a form of social entertainment. It is, in short, a spectacle, one designed to give a facade of legitimacy to the governance of a country under the control of transnational elites. One pays attention to candidates like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, if at all, as another form of televised sports. And, just as one tunes out the World Series if you don't care about baseball, a lot of people are tuning out the 2012 election because they don't, for good reason, care about mainstream politics.

Spectacles like this are costly, especially when the producers are facing a headwind of indifference, so it comes as no surprise that President Obama will raise an amount of money close to the $770 million he raised for his 2008 campaign. By the early part of January, Romney has raised more than $56 million, an amount that is likely to increase substantially if it becomes likely that he will be the Republican nominee. Gingrich is receiving generous SuperPAC support from right wing, anti-union, arch Zionist Sheldon Abelson and his wife, Miriam, a reward for appalling, ill-informed political positions that he has expressed for decades. Gingrich can also expect an acceleration of contributions if it appears that he will be the nominee.

But this is background noise for most people, because they have already seen through the charade, the self-referentiality of a process whereby the same people who obsess over the debt and Iran enthusiastically promote candidates who mirror their beliefs. I know a number of people involved in partisan politics who follow it closely, including people involved in unions, and I rarely hear them say anything about the campaign. Sacramento, as the capital of California, is a political place, and yet those who one would expect to talk about it avidly are, by and large, silent. On the Internet, I have noticed that the number of comments in response to 2012 campaign posts over at firedoglake are down in comparison to the number of comments in response to 2008 ones, which is to be expected, I guess, but not this much. I should visit DailyKos to confirm, but I don't have the stomach for it. These are expressions of the post-partisan Obama legacy: the recognition that participation in the electoral process is useless.

Political protest strategies have evolved accordingly. Back in the early to mid-1990s, protest organizers worked on the assumption that elected officials could be influenced through public pressure. Hence, the effort against NAFTA. By the late 1990s, people were beginning to question this assumption. The protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1998 announced the introduction of disruptive direct action methods into the mainstream. Radical environmentalists had already discovered the futility of the conventional practices of protest marches, letter writing campaigns and visits to the offices of elected representatives, and they played a prominent role in the shutdown of downtown Seattle. Trade unionists, on the other hand, played the traditional march and rally game, consciously distancing themeselves, with some exceptions, from the police assaults upon locked down protesters in the central city.

Organizers of the protests against the impending Iraq war in February 2003 took the later approach, and, predictably, failed. Direct action undertaken immediately after the start of the war quickly fizzled out. More recently, there was a tremendous effort to push Congress towards the implementation of a meaningful health care reform. Contrary to Obama apologists who blame the victims by saying that we didn't do enough to make it pass a progressive measure, there was a tremendous, broad based effort to pressure the Congress and the White House. Beyond requiring the President and the Democrats in Congress to adopt public relations strategies to conceal their complicity in the bill as passed and adopted, it failed, too.

In the aftermath of the intransigence of the political system, we are now seeing people gravitate towards more confrontational and amorphous methods of protest. In California, UC students, angry over fee increases, dismiss the importunings of UC administrators to lobby the legislature, and instead seize campus buildings, call general strikes and attempt to storm meetings of the regents. Implicit within these actions is a condemnation of the hierarchies of privilege and access that are interwoven within the modernist university. Likewise, people in the East Bay angry over killings by the BART police sought to disrupt transit service, although they have made some effort to address the BART board in an attempt to get rid of these cops entirely.

Of course, Occupy has been the inevitable extension of these protest tactics in the face of the hostility of elected officials. By refusing to make demands, people involved in Occupy have expressed their contempt for the corrupted political process. Nihilism is the consequence of such an entrenched, corrupted elite, and the refusal to make demands is an obvious manifestation of it. Direct action, such as assisting people against threatened foreclosures (an activity that, admittedly, predates Occupy), is another one, as the participants have decided that they must help people themselves because the government will not do otherwise do so. Similarly, the seizures of abandoned buildings and properties undertaken by OWS, Occupy Oakland, and, possibly, Occupy SF, for the purpose of providing shelter and services (again, an activity that predates Occupy), highlight how the government and the economic system rely upon artificially imposed scarcity to generate poverty.

Occupy therefore represents the extent of the accumulated despair experienced by those who have suffered over the course of the ongoing recession, and the willingness of some of the victims to undertake actions that would have been imcomprehensible to them just a few years before. Consistent with this, there is, within Occupy, primarily among its younger participants, an emotional, philosophical rejection of contemporary capitalist society itself, one with echoes of May '68, social movements in South America, and violent protests in Greece and Algeria. It is but a thread, but a logical one in light of the refusal of those in power to address the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands and the desperation that results from it. But it remains to be seen whether a nihilistic combination of enforced disassocation from the political process and the performance of direct action will provide a way forward to create a new, more humane, more egalitarian society.

War with Iran?

2012-01-24T18:48:00.016-05:00

UPDATE: From a CNN report:

The lives of ordinary Iranians have been deeply touched by the Western sanctions. Several spoke to CNN about how they are coping with staggering inflation and a plunging national currency, although none felt comfortable being fully identified, fearful of the Islamic Republic's long reach into private lives.
Farhad, 47, was once comfortable, but things began sliding downhill when sanctions came and the foreign oil firm that employed him packed up and left.
As a taxi driver, he works hard but saves little money. With the latest round of U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran's Central Bank last month, he has seen staggering inflation; the price of meat and milk have skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent.
He and his wife have stopped having guests at their home or going out to eat. They can't remember when they bought new clothes and no longer send their suits to the cleaners.
I feel bad for the cleaners, he says. They must be suffering as a result of people like me not using their services.
Farhad has a savings account that is shrinking fast as he dips into it to make ends meet.
His 21-year-old son works two part-time jobs while he earns a degree in computer science. Farhad feels bad that he can't afford to buy him the computer equipment he needs.
I wait and pray for something to spark the economy and get it going, but I am not holding my breath, he says. Life must go on. We can only wait and see what the future has in store for us.
In the meantime, he says, the only way for his sons to live a decent life is to fall in with influential people or make shady business deals like trading foreign currency on the black market.

INITIAL POST: Alexander Cockburn believes that war with Iran is inevitable. Indeed, he maintains, as have a number of others, that the conflict has already begun. Beyond the black budget covert operations, there is the direct US assault upon the country's economy, as revealed by a precipitous decline in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial. The embargo of Iranian oil, to be enforced by punitive measures against international corporations that facilitate the sale of it, is beginning to inflict greater and greater hardship upon the Iranian populace, no doubt in the expectation that the real US objective, regime change, will soon be accomplished. The European Union, consistent with its history of hesitant support for US imperial action, has agreed to embargo Iranian oil this summer.

Meanwhile, voices for war in the US have privileged access to the media, with outlets like the New York Times, NPR and PBS providing a veneer of understated, urbane legitimacy to the more populist, shrill expressions of militarism found elsewhere. Journalists and foreign policy analysts perpetually reference a non-existent nuclear weapons program, subject only to subsequent, tepid criticisms buried within newspapers and websites. Furthermore, as noted by John Glaser of antiwar.com, while opponents of military action have been granted the opportunity to challenge the case for war, the media has confined the debate within the boundaries of the acceptance of the necessity to stop the Iranian nuclear research program.

Of course, the reason for such a circumscribed debate is obvious. As already noted, the real objective of US policy is regime change. Indeed, it would not be shocking if, upon the emergence of a new, acceptable Iranian government, the US, Europe and Israel permitted the nuclear research program to proceed. After all, as explained here last year, there are few endeavors so perfectly suited to the proliferation of the hierarchy of specialization and the accumulation of capital than the construction of nuclear research facilities and power plants. Iranian nuclear research scientists currently trying to avoid assassination would find themselves welcome at academic conferences and research programs around the world. Accordingly, the Iranian nuclear research program is merely a MacGuffin that accelerates the plot of the regime change narrative.

Hence, any public discussion in the US that would result in a candid discussion of the US relationship with Iran, and the true objectives of US policy, must be suppressed. Cockburn, for understandable reasons, analogizes current US policy towards Iran with US policy towards Japan before the attack upon Pearl Harbor. But, a more contemporary, and perhaps, more apposite one, is US policy towards the Allende government in Chile. Just as the US waged an economic war upon Chile in the early 1970s, the US is now doing so against Iran. But, as Pepe Escobar has recognized, the consequences of such economic warfare are as likely to hurt the G-20 countries as much as Iran because of the growth suppression associated with increased oil prices. He astutely notes that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner actually argued against the sanctions bill as it made its way through Congress. With characteristic hyperbole that contains grains of troubling insight, Escobar concludes: the name of the game in 2012 is deep global recession. Conversely, Iranians may be able to offset the inflated prices of imported goods with increased employment as a devalued rial makes domestically produced goods more competitive.

Unfortunately, that's the more optimistic scenario. As Behzad Yaghmaian said today:

The United States and its allies are using elaborate economic sanctions to drain the resources of the Iranian regime, ignite domestic revolt, and force the government to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Sanctions are, however, chocking the Iranian people. While the government continues enriching uranium, sanctions penalize the Iranian people through dizzying increase in the price of food, gasoline and other basic items in ordinary people’s basket of consumer goods. Food inflation in Iran is currently at 50%, more than double the official inflation rate.
Fear of new sanctions and war also created an exodus from the local currency to the dollar and other major currencies. The nearly 60% depreciation of the Iranian rial, and the embargo on Iran’s oil exports will further increase food and other consumer goods prices. The dire economic conditions of Iranians with fixed income is a painful reminder of standing in long line for hours to buy milk, oil, and other basic necessities during the war with Iraq.

Yaghmaian concludes with a warning, that the passivity of the Iranian people should not be misunderstood as support for military confrontation. In this, they possess an insight beyond many Americans, particularly those who respond to the exhortations of Republican presidential candidates for military action with applause. Even more troubling is the possibility that the economic elites of the G-20 have decided that Iran is the next great capital accumulation opportunity of disaster capitalism. Just imagine the prospects for private military contractors, private security and surveillance firms and construction companies. Exponentially more in billions await them than they received over the course of the Iraqi occupation. For now, they are still patient enough to find out if the sanctions will work because they can avoid the risks associated with military conflict. But, with no fear of significant public resistance, the way is clear for them to seek a military resolution if they fail.

Given the acquiescence of liberals and social democrats in the US and Europe, the likelihood of protests against such a war on the scale of February 2003 is nil. This is most terrifying aspect of the current situation in the Gulf, the fact that there is not even the pretense of a restraint upon their ability to launch an indefinite, tremendously destructive war in order to further concentrate their wealth and power. But what comes afterwards? The great variable is the response of the burgeoning population of young people around the world, the people who fight the police on the streets of Athens, Cairo, Rome, Manama, London, Oakland, Lyon and Santiago, among other places, the people who realize that their future is bleak because of the avariousness and violence of those who have come before them. What will they do? The success or failure of this hideous venture is dependent upon the answer.

Ustreaming Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

2012-01-21T23:37:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, Officer Ali of the San Francisco Police Department decided to club pfailblog, one of the ustreamers of the Occupy Wall Street West actions:

This is not something that happens by accident, a consequence of the turbulent emotions associated with political protest in a contentious urban setting like San Francisco. As elsewhere, like New York City, for example, the police know the livestreamers and ustreamers and harass them. In addition to pfailblog, another ustreamer was picked out of a protest and arrested, while Ali also shoved pixplz while he was ustreaming along California Street.

Updates on Occupy Wall Street West

2012-01-20T13:19:00.004-05:00

Most recent at 10:20AM PST:

Occupy Bernal Shuts Down Bernal B of A Branch
10:11am -- 45 Occupy Bernal protestors led by four families fighting eviction and foreclosure delivered demand letter and shut down Bank of America branch at 3250 Mission and 29th Streets, heading to Wells Fargo branch at 22nd and Mission Streets.

Banner Blocking Downtown Traffic
10:04am -- Banner blocking intersection at Montgomery and California.

15 Protestors Lock Entrances at Bank of America
10:01am -- 15 protestors lock down entrances at Bank of America at 345 Montgomery.

Protestors Take to the Streets at Bank of America
9:57am -- Protestors take to the streets at Bank of America at 345 Montgomery.

20+ Protestors Gather at Bank of America Branch
9:54am -- Twenty to twenty-five protestors have gathered at the Bank of America branch at Powell and Market Streets.

Police Commander Confirms Seven Arrests at Wells Fargo Headquarters
9:22am -- Police Commander confirms seven arrests so far at Wells Fargo Headquarters entrance at 420 Montgomery.

Police Raid at Wells Fargo Headquarters
9:22am -- Police are blocking off access to Wells Fargo Headquarters entrance at 420 Montgomery and cutting protestors out of lock boxes to arrest them.

Foreclosure House Party
9:21am -- Foreclosure house party with music and furniture at 7th and Sansome Sts.

Protest Shutting Down Wells Fargo Headquarters
8:50am -- 40 protestors and some squids now blocking entrances at Code Pink action at Wells Fargo Headquarters, 420 Montgomery St (at California).

Go here for more updates over the course of the day. You can also stay informed on Twitter at #occupysf, #occupywallstwest, #OWSwest and #occupyoakland. Tweets there will direct you to ustreams and livestreams of actions as they happen. Occupy Network is currently broadcasting two streams out of downtown San Francisco. Yesterday's post also names some of the possible ustreamers and livestreamers. There are also Occupy the Courts protests taking place in other parts of the country as well, including one on the steps of the US Supreme Court.

Occupy Wall Street West

2012-01-19T18:46:00.007-05:00

UPDATE: For a flyer that sets out the location of planned actions, with explanations, go here. Scroll down for the map.

INITIAL POST: Tomorrow:

6:00am Occupy Wall St West!
Day-long Nonviolent Mass Occupation

When: Fri, January 20, 6am – 9pm

Where: San Francisco's Financial District (map)

Description: See http://www.OccupyWallStWest.org for developing details

San Francisco Financial District
DAYLONG NONVIOLENT MASS OCCUPATION
of the Wall St. banks & corporations attacking our communities
DON’T GO TO (OR WALK OUT OF) WORK AND SCHOOL

Organized groups will be coordinating specific direct actions and set their times and places. For members of the public/Occupy that are not part of an organized group, you can converge on Bradley Manning Plaza (Justine Herman) and join with others at any of these times, 6:00am, 12 Noon and 5:00pm.

For more background, go here and here.

Starting at 6am PST tomorrow, you can follow the day's events on Twitter at #OccupySF, #OWSWest and #OccupyWallStWest, among others. There will be at least 8 ustreamers providing video broadcasts of the actions over the course of the day, including pixplz, occupy-sf-maya, codeframeosf and mikeqtips, as well as the occupysf channel. Go to http://www.ustream.tv to find them. The Twitter feed will undoubtedly have links to these ustreamers and others as well as events unfold.

Who Killed the Public Option?

2012-01-18T13:42:00.008-05:00

I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, so much so that I found myself interested in a post over at firedoglake about Richard Kirsch, Health Care for America Now and the abandonment of the public option during the passage of health care reform. For those of you with any remaining doubt that over the lack of Democratic support for the public option, Talking Points Memo dispels it during the course of a review of Kirsch's recently released book about his experience:

The book is Fighting For Our Health, by Richard Kirsch, who directed the advocacy group Health Care for America Now during the push for reform. HCAN is a well financed umbrella group backed by scores of liberal groups, unions, and other reformers — making Kirsch a close witness to the entire saga. He confirms that the White House treated the public option like a bargaining chip with powerful industry players, and believes that when his group became most critical of the bill mid-way through the fight, that top White House aides sought to have him canned.
The White House had negotiated a number of deals with the health industry, designed to win their support for reform, including agreeing to oppose a robust public option, which would have the greatest clout to control how much providers got paid, writes Kirsch, largely confirming what has become an open secret in Washington.
Kirsch’s book is replete with similar stories. Thematically, it centers on contradictions within the Democratic party, and Obama himself, that gave rise to the infighting that marked the debate. To keep factions from spinning apart, Kirsch suggests, the administration was averse from the outset to the idea that progressives and sympathetic stakeholders should play an outside game, pressuring the President and problem Democrats in Congress to pass robust reforms.

By way of background, it is important to note that the public option was a watered down version of single payer, designed to provide an acceptable alternative for a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress. Perhaps, you recall that the passage of health care reform with a public option and the availability of generic drugs, also voted down in Congress, was mentioned by progressives as one of the reasons that it was essential for to vote for Obama and the Democrats in 2008.The public option, it seems, was more about creating a transfer station for those health care reform supporters traveling from single payer to the individual mandate than it was about an actual policy that could be effectively implemented.

Upon reading the Talking Points Memo review, one is immediately struck by the fact that the White House could not even tolerate the mild advocacy of an Obama friendly organization like HCAN. In the end, Kirsch got back in line, as HCAN urged its supporters to call Congress to get the final version of the bill passed, warts and all, as a visit to the HCAN homepage demonstrates. HCAN is therefore a cautionary story about how a progressive organization created for a particular, socially beneficial purpose ended up as an advocate for what it purportedly loathed, a neoliberal health care reform that places much of the costs on the middle class, although one can plausible argue that this was the true objective of those who created HCAN from the inception.

Not surprisingly, if the Talking Points Memo review of his book gives us an accurate impression of the scope of his book, Kirsch evades these unpleasant truths. Even today, it seems, Kirsch just can't be forthcoming with those who would support his objectives. Kirsch and HCAN refused, during the legislative process, to inform the public about what had already been done to the public option, and, in fact, continued to lead people to believe that, through public pressure, legislators could be induced to pass it. It was all just one big Kabuki show, where Kirsch and HCAN, with the support of labor unions like AFSCME and SEIU, and progressive groups like MoveON.org, mislead progressives and workers because they felt it was more important to dissemble and maintain an illusory influence with the White House than it was to be truthful with those who made phone calls, sent letters and organized rallies in support of the public option. Indeed, Kirsch is still being dishonest with this book, because, according to Talking Points Memo, it attributes the refusal of Obama to fight for a public option to a failure of political nerve and a misguided political strategy, when, instead, it is entirely consistent with the neoliberal, financial sector orientation of his policies.

Put bluntly, Kirsch and HCAN believe that people like you and me need to understand that we have to accept such manipulation as part of the effort to implement the progressive agenda. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly what many of the Strauss influenced neoconservatives say about foreign policy. From this loss of credibility in the legislative process and the institutionalized progressive organizations that considered it pragmatic to manipulate their supporters for the benefit of the White House, we now have Occupy. The failure of the progressive mobilization for health care reform and a Keynesian stimulus plan for the economy induced many to draw the inescapable conclusion that the electoral process merely serves the purpose of legitimizing corporate control of the US political system. They embraced the direct action ethos of Occupy as a form of resistance.

Occupy Wells Fargo Live

2012-01-14T16:00:00.020-05:00

UPDATE 3 (2:03PM PST): There have been 5 arrests. The police have gotten out of the alley, and taken the arrestees to the nearby police station. Protesters are now in front of the station and demanding their release.

UPDATE 2 (1:55PM PST): Protesters have blocked the police paddy wagon trying to take away the arrestees in an alley.

UPDATE 1 (1:43 PM PST): Several cops have climbed up a fire truck ladder onto the roof, and taken the banners away. First arrests. Chants of let the people go, arrest the CEO!

INITIAL POST (1:02 PM PST): At 1:02 PM, California time, OccupySF is currently protesting foreclosures and evictions by Wells Fargo at the Wells Fargo branch right by the 16h Street and Mission BART station. Banners have been dropped and there are tents on the roof. he police have closed the parking lot with tape and tried to persuade activists to leave the roof without being arrested. For video, go here. Justin Beck, the public affairs director at KDVS in 1998 who put me on the radio, is the ustreamer. For twitter updates, go here.

OccupySF has described the purpose of this action as follows:

Thousands of renters and homeowners in San Francisco are being evicted by banks each year. San Francisco’s Mission District has been especially hard hit by the 1% banks preying on the 99% working class. Join Occupy SF Housing at Noon on January 14 to protest evictions of renters for condo conversions, which are being done by real estate speculators working with Wells Fargo Bank. We will demand that Wells Fargo stop all pending evictions which they are financing and to stop financing any more evictions for profit, where low & moderate income renters are evicted so affordable apartments can be converted into luxury condominiums for the wealthy.

Today's action is the first of what OccupySF has described as the Occupy Wall Street West campaign, which will culminate with planned mass occupations in the financial district on this upcoming Friday, January 20th.

Occupy Oakland and the American Licorice Strike

2012-01-13T17:17:00.002-05:00

On Tuesday, participants in Occupy Oakland joined workers from Baker's Workers Union 125 on the picket line at American Licorice, the manufacturer of Red Vines, in Union City. They had been striking for about 36 days over American Licorice's new contract proposal to increase the share of the employee heath care contribution for the coverage of their families in 2013 and 2014. According to OakFoSho, the plant is turning out Red Vines around the clock.

Noah Zimmerman described his experience:

The picket looked strong. Hundreds of people I guessed, stretching along Whipple and around the corner to their mailbox at 2477 Liston Way (American Licorice’s phone number is 510-487-5500 if you want to call and confirm the address). Food, tables and chairs were set up. The workers on strike were members of Bakery Workers Union Local 125. They were mostly Latino. I spotted Occupy Oakland picketing the main entrance. It looked like the two groups were self-segregating.
Union City police were out in force. So were Hayward, Fremont and Newark police. A mutual aid agreement between the departments. Everything looked heavy but at least the riot gear wasn’t out.
Then, I saw them behind the main gate where the Oakland Occupiers were on a moving picket. Goons. Hired goons. Three of them, observing the picketers from behind the gate. The Huffmaster Security Crisis Team. Red Vines, which everyone eats at the movie theater (if anyone can still afford to go out) not only pull fillings out of your teeth but make factory bosses to pull out their checkbooks for present-day Pinkertons.
One of them was built like a brickhouse. He looked like a creation of Vince McMahon’s steroid-addled imagination. Asshole #1, one of the workers said, gesturing to him. No name? I asked. Asshole #1. He shoves people. Interesting.
One fellow in a Carhartt jacket told me that American Licorice was hiring scabs through a temp agency in Emeryville. They had Huffmaster ferry them in a white van. I heard the workers hadn’t tried to block the scabs up until that day.
So workers and occupiers blocked them.
The Huffmasters used a manuever where they put their hands on the hood of the vehicle and backed into the crowd. Someone sat down in front of the vehicle. There was nothing they could do, especially with dozens of cell cameras witnessing everything, live, versus Huffmaster’s one puny Sony Handicam without an Internet connection. The vehicle was repulsed. Back to the American Licorice lot, scab wagon.
A win. It’s happening. Now.
Again, with another vehicle, a Sentra with a Huffmaster logo on the dash, trying to get in. Some goon squad middle manager. Sit down in front of the car. Asshole #1 is clearly the ringleader on the ground of this union-busting wrecking crew. He looks like ex-military, which Huffmaster brags about hiring on their website. He cracks a bit. His latern jaw twitches as he tries to back into the crowd. How about no? We rejected the last vehicle and we reject this one, too.

I'd like to be able to say that the workers at American Licorice prevailed, that the community support provided by Occupy Oakland turned the tide. But it didn't. The workers at American Licorice decided to accept the company's offer. Again, according to Zimmerman:

Personally, I more surprised than disappointed that this happened so quickly at the federal negotiation table in Oakland. Rene Castillo was disappointed but the union voted democratically to accept the offer. I agree with Rene that if they had voted to stay on the picket line a little longer, based on what I saw on the line yesterday, the workers had the momentum.
At the same time, one month in the middle of winter is an incredibly long time to hold down a nonstop picket. It’s costly to families to not have a normal income. It’s cold out. Food is expensive, gas is expensive, housing is expensive. Strike funds get drained, especially with 178 workers. The tenaciousness and reserve of the workers was difficult to put into words and I only saw second to last day of the strike. They’d been out there since December 5th.
I think that this experience working in solidarity with Local 125 is a learning process for both Occupy Oakland, Occupy as a whole and unions who ask for our support. The biggest lesson to me is that time is of the essence. I heard rumors about Local 125 asking for support perhaps a week ago yet it took until yesterday for us to get organized enough to get down there and support them. This isn’t to point fingers. I should have done something earlier instead of passively waiting for instructions or a committee. So should have you if you felt passionate about it.
Our tactics were effective. Occupy can do things that union members can’t, like sit down in front of vehicles crossing the picket line.
The biggest lesson that I took away from this is we absolutely cannot dawdle when workers’ rights are under attack and our brothers and sisters put a call out for our help. Our goal should be to be able to deploy ourselves and our resources the next day within the Bay Area to any union that requests support in a labor struggle.
This is the first time Occupy Oakland or any Occupation as far as I know of was specifically asked for help in a labor dispute. Despite the settlement agreement, I consider yesterday a success. We are learning and adapting. This movement is fluid, evolving and its many moving parts are becoming finely tuned. Our network and connections with others in the 99% are growing stronger. I liked the people on a personal level on the picket lines. I won’t forget Yolanda, Maria, Juana, Maria and Rene Jr. or Sr. I met new people from Occupy Oakland and the labor community. I broke bread with them. The humor and conversations I had with others with will stay with me. I live in Richmond and have only driven through Union City before yesterday. I have a feeling I’ll cross paths with these comrades again sometime soon.

I hope that Zimmerman's cautious optimism is justifed. Certainly, any successful attempt to transform American society requires the kind of mutual aid provided for the benefit of the American Licorice workers in Union City.

Who Will You Believe This Time?

2012-01-12T17:11:00.008-05:00

Despite his anachronistic social and economic perspectives, Ron Paul has performed a great public service by exposing the lies by which those in the military, the government and the media are using to try to persuade the public to support an attack upon Iran. To date, I haven't noticed any progressive organization, such as, for example, MoveON.org or Rebuild the Dream, say anything at all about it. My search query at the website for each, using the term Iran, humorously generated a Nothing Found result.

Occupy and the Urgency of Inclusion

2012-01-11T18:25:00.016-05:00

As noted here last month, Pham Binh posted an insightful examination of Occupy as a social movement, acknowledging its achievements while identifying potential weaknesses. For example, consider the following observation:

One of the most important elements that makes Occupy an uprising and not merely a mass movement is its alleged leaderlessness. Of course as Marxists we know that every struggle requires leadership in some form, and Occupy is no exception. The leaders of Occupy are those who put their bodies on the line at the encampments and get deeply involved in the complex, Byzantine decision-making process Occupy uses known as modified consensus. Occupy’s leaders are those who make the proposals at planning meetings, working groups, and General Assemblies (GAs) that attract enough support to determine the uprising’s course of action.
The people leading the uprising are those who are willing to make the biggest sacrifices for it.
Since Occupy is self-organizing and self-led by its most dedicated participants, attempts to make its decision-making process more accessible to those who are not willing or able to dedicate themselves to Occupy 24 hours a day, seven days a week will fall flat. All day, all week, occupy Wall Street! is not just a chant, it is a way of life for Occupy’s de facto leadership.
This reality has affected the class character of encampment participants, who tend to be either what Karl Marx called lumpenproletariat (long-term homeless, hustlers, drug addicts, and others who have fallen through the cracks of the capitalist edifice) or highly educated (white) students, ex-students, and graduate students. The former joined the encampments not just to eat and sleep in a relatively safe place but also because they hope the uprising will win real, meaningful change. The latter tend to dominate Occupy’s convoluted decision-making process and what motivates them is identical to what motivates the lumpenproletarian elements: hope that Occupy will win real, meaningful change. Many of these people are saddled with tremendous amounts of personal debt, have worked two or three part-time jobs simultaneously, or were unable to find work in their field despite their expensive, extensive educations. They were destined to be secure petty bourgeois or well-paid white-collar workers before the ongoing fallout from the 2008 crisis claimed their futures and put their backs against the wall. This is the material reality underpinning the determination of Occupy participants to keep coming back despite repeated arrests, beatings, and setbacks. Their determination is the stuff revolutions are made of.

In other words, Occupy is a social movement that purports to give expression to working class concerns in the absence of working class participation, with the limited exception of Occupy Oakland. Tiny of POOR Magazine in San Francisco describes the ambiguity of the movement for people whose lives are seemingly beyond the comprehension of those involved in Occupy:

Four sets of human arms shot out of the revolving doors of Wells Fargo Bank in downtown San Francisco, while 6 bodies hugged the sides of the building. Po’Lice officers stood at confused attention while customers and downtown workers skirted the perimeter of the Foreclose on Wall Street Rally which included over 2000 people in attendence. Wells Fargo employees stood on the other side of the glass in a collective freeze frame. Every chant by the people sitting at the mouth of the bank was matched with hundreds of echoes repeated by the huge crowd in front of them.
Co-editor of POOR Magazine, Tony Robles and me, both the children of poor workers of color, who never even had enough money to apply, qualify or think of getting a mortgage, much-less any kind of a bank loan, stood there in witness, mouths agape. My mother always joked that our indigenous family was lucky to stay in the cardboard hotels when we traveled and were so poor and herstorically landless that we would have to squat our burial place just to have somewhere to die.
And yet, the power of that moment, even if it wasn’t us or other always landless peoples they were speaking for, I know they were speaking truth to domination. Corporate, Racist, Exclusionary domination that is and has always oppressed so many poor peoples, indigenous peoples and communities of color since the beginning of the Other Occupation of all of the indigenous lands on Turtle Island that continues today.
After today, I am taking all of my money out of Wells Fargo, said Jessie, 81 an elder who stood quietly on the perimeter of the huge crowd with a sign that said simply I am the 99%.
POOR Magazine was in the march on this day, sadly with only three members, we did have four family members but several of our poor parents are houseless and jobless and so our fourth member had his phone cut off the night before and so we couldn’t find each other in the masses of people, and all of our other family members were working one of several jobs and hustles and so they didn’t even have the privilege to be there at all.
At first I was taken by the almost flawless organizing by Bay Area non-profit organizations. From the emcee to the turn-out from group after group, the whole event was wound tightly as a rope on a drum. Each act of civil disobedience, set-off at the mouths of Wells Fargo bank branches, were beautifully orchestrated stages of theatre and action. It was obvious that funded organizations with time and paid staff had organized this event down to the last balloon, slightly like a party we at POOR Magazine had never received an invitation to.
As we left the protest to get our young kids to school on time, Tony and I spoke about the power of the resistance that we had just been part of. I brought up how although I am excited and about all of the issues peoples were speaking and acting on I remain vexed by the fact that as poor peoples of color and indigenous peoples we are constantly in battle, in protest about the genocide and violence perpetrated on us and yet it is a struggle for us to get 50 people to show up for protests, so what is the difference? and what really is our role in all of these resistance occupations as poor peoples of color in struggle who are also in struggle with the occupation of our time due to no-wage and low-wage work, system abuse and ongoing criminalization and why do our resistance movements stay at the margins of what is important to show up for?

For many poor and working class people, Occupy remains on the other side of a window that they can only peer through, much like the Christmas toys and displays at a Union Square department store. So, how can Occupy reach them? How can Occupy provide a place for them that recognizes their experience and empowers them to participate in the creation of a new world? Such questions imply a social enterprise beyond the spectacular successes of Occupy like the Day of Action in Manhattan and the general strike and port shutdown in Oakland. Indeed, the port shutdown on December 12th was a classic instance of the glass being either half empty or half full, depending on one's perspective. The participation of many union members was impressive, and yet, there remains a tension between those associated with the bureaucratized methods of trade unionism and the spontaneity of Occupy activists, as touched upon here and here and here and here.

I have no answers for these questions, except to say that I hope that those involved in Occupy emphasize a flexible, inclusive method of activism, as they have successfully done in many instances, over one that exalts organizational forms. As correctly noted by Pham, Occupy has evolved into a form of organization that effectively excludes many who might otherwise participate, and, even worse, may ultimately result in a predominately middle class orientation over time. One hears echoes of such an outcome from some participants in occupations that see the problem primarily in terms of the need to reimpose the restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act upon the financial sector, reverse the Citizens United decision so as to curtail the influence of corporate political contributions and get the police under control. It is the willingness of those involved in Occupy Oakland to recognize that there is a material basis for our current distress that makes it so politically appealing, rough edges, missteps and all.

While the port shutdown exposed tensions between unions and Occupy, many of the organizers understood how to effectively overcome them:

By reaching out to and including the voices of rank-and-filers and labor activists, we collaborated with them to build the community picket line, rather than scheming in secret about how to blockade them from going to work. As a result, we were able to weather the attacks in the weeks leading up to the action--a barrage that came not only from the 1 percent and the media, but from union leaders who repeatedly tried to stifle participation in December 12.
The port action committee had a well-organized plan in place for December 12. People in the committee organized picket teams, communications and food distribution. There were teams to plan for speakers and rallies, and to make sure signs and banners were printed and brought to the gates. Organizers were also in close communication with port workers about which terminals had ships and which did not, so we knew which gates to picket.
There was also explicit outreach to talk to self-identified anti-capitalist forces who had declared a march at the same time as the port action--to ask them to agree to the tactics decided for the day.
Ultimately, the proof of these preparations lies in the success of the event itself. Hundreds of people showed up before dawn to put up community pickets before the first shift, and even larger numbers came in the evening. No ILWU members crossed picket lines. Teamsters didn't show up that day, and hundreds of non-unionized truckers stayed away. As for truckers who were at the docks, many showed their support in various ways.
None of that could have been accomplished without the support of workers at the Port of Oakland.

Beyond this, there is the problem of the 24/7 activists. As explained by Bifo in After the Future, there is only one psychological destination for them: burnout and depression. In this, the 24/7 activists of Occupy are mirroring the capitalist, corporate world that they are rebelling against. Just as those who are willing to dedicate their lives in the service of the corporation rise to the highest rungs, to positions like Chief Financial Officer and Chief Executive Officer, those willing to spend their time almost exclusively upon Occupy attain the most influence. Corporate executives are treated by psychiatrists who prescribe them psychotropic medications, while activists probably self-medicate. In both instances, there is the risk of serious impairment of judgment. Bifo asserts that the financial catastrophes of last twenty years may have been partially caused by executives addicted to inhibition reducing drugs like Prozac and Zoloft, drugs that induced them to believe that any risk could be overcome. One wonders if the combination of self-medication and depression among activists is a contributing factor towards selecting confrontation with the police as a political strategy.

Of course, none of this should be construed as a criticism of those who have committed themselves to Occupy and released its revolutionary potential. Rather, it should be considered a warning as to what might happen if the movement does not successfully engage people like Tiny, her husband and others like them who possess an intense desire to change the world in which they live even as they struggle to survive from day to day. Only through such participation can we move beyond a social model that replicates the obsessive, representational qualities of capitalism in a disguised form. Such a utopian aspiration is no easy task, but is worth recalling that capitalism itself was a utopian enterprise, albeit a perverse one, for many centuries. An intensified emphasis upon the daily suffering of people, and an insistence that it be immediately addressed, as opposed to one centered around legalistic agendas based upon the regulation of financial capital and the electoral process, strikes me as essential to such an endeavor. Along these lines, it is worth noting that participants in Occupy Oakland walked the picket line in support of American Licorice workers in Union City.

The Birth Defects of Fallujah

2012-01-08T12:58:00.006-05:00

As I discussed in a post from July 2010, this is one of those successes of the US invasion and occupation that you don't hear publicized here very much. A doctor in Fallujah believes that a proliferation of children born with shocking birth defects is related to the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium weapons in Fallujah in 2004:

Dr Samira Alani, a paediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, has taken a personal interest in investigating an explosion of congenital abnormalities that have mushroomed in the wake of the US sieges since 2005.
We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine, Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.
As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699.
There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we've never seen them until now, she said. So when I describe it all I can do is describe the physical defects, but I'm unable to provide a medical term.
Most of these babies in Fallujah die within 20 to 30 minutes after being born, but not all.
Four-year-old Abdul Jaleel Mohammed was born in October 2007. His clinical diagnosis includes dilation of two heart ventricles, and a growth on his lower back that doctors have not been able to remove.
Abdul has trouble controlling his muscles, struggles to walk, cannot control his bladder, and weakens easily. Doctors told his father, Mohamed Jaleel Abdul Rahim, that his son has severe nervous system problems, and could develop fluid build-up in his brain as he ages, which could prove fatal.
This is the first instance of something like this in all our family? Rahim told Al Jazeera. We lived in an area that was heavily bombed by the Americans in 2004, and a missile landed right in front of our home. What else could cause these health problems besides this?
Dr Alani told Al Jazeera that in the vast majority of cases she has documented, the family had no prior history of ongenital abnormalities.
Alani showed Al Jazeera hundreds of photos of babies born with cleft palates, elongated heads, a baby born with one eye in the centre of its face, overgrown limbs, short limbs, and malformed ears, noses and spines.

Of course, as noted in the Al Jazeera article, there may be such clusters of birth defects to varying degrees elsewhere in Iraq as well, because the US did not limit the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium weapons to Fallujah. Furthermore, according to Dr. Sharif al-Alwachi, cancer rates have escalated substantially in Babil Province in southern Iraq. Another doctor measured radiation rates in Basra and Kerbala, and the indicator on the Geiger counter went beyond the range. It is impossible to know the severity of the problem because of a lack of doctors and researchers available to conduct a comprehensive investigation, but 42 sites with high levels of nuclear radiation and dioxin contamination have been identified by the Iraqi government:

Southern Iraq, especially Basra, have been adversely affected by such contamination:

The environment minister, Narmin Othman, said high levels of dioxins on agricultural lands in southern Iraq, in particular, were increasingly thought to be a key factor in a general decline in the health of people living in the poorest parts of the country.
If we look at Basra, there are some heavily polluted areas there and there are many factors contributing to it, she told the Guardian. First, it has been a battlefield for two wars, the Gulf war and the Iran-Iraq war, where many kinds of bombs were used. Also, oil pipelines were bombed and most of the contamination settled in and around Basra.
The soil has ended up in people's lungs and has been on food that people have eaten. Dioxins have been very high in those areas. All of this has caused systemic problems on a very large scale for both ecology and overall health.

Unfortunately, the Guardian article does not explain the potential sources for the dioxin contamination, but, in regard to radiation, one one can reasonbly conclude that it probable that many parts of Iraq have experienced levels of radiation exposure and contamination substantially in excess what is known about Japan after the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns. And, it is important to recognize that the US did not first commence to subject Iraq to radiation contamination in 2003 as explained in this 2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article:

On the Highway of Death, 11 miles north of the Kuwait border, a collection of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles are rusting in the desert.
They also are radiating nuclear energy.
In 1991, the United States and its Persian Gulf War allies blasted the vehicles with armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium -- the first time such weapons had been used in warfare -- as the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait. The devastating results gave the highway its name.
Today, nearly 12 years after the use of the super-tough weapons was credited with bringing the war to a swift conclusion, the battlefield remains a radioactive toxic wasteland -- and depleted uranium munitions remain a mystery.
Although the Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, Iraqi doctors believe that it is responsible for a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans.

While the US military denies it, retired Major Doug Rokke believes that the use of depleted uranium during the 1991 Gulf War was responsible for subsequent cancer clusters in the Basra area:

Major Doug Rokke, now retired, was in charge of cleaning up American tanks hit by DU during the Gulf War—casualties of friendly fire. He said the DU dust got blown far away by the wind and entered the soil and water supply. Dr. Rokke, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, said many of the men in his cleanup crew developed the same kinds of cancers seen among Iraqi children.
The first member of our staff to develop cancer was sleeping downwind from where we collected the contaminated equipment, he said. This was in Saudi Arabia. He developed cancer of the larynx and throat within nine months. He was breathing in the dust, which we know goes tremendous distances. The first lung cancers were within two years and the first deaths were fairly rapid.
When DU hits a hard target, it creates a small, radioactive fireball.
Dr. Rokke believes depleted uranium poses a particular danger for children because their young bodies are more vulnerable. DU is both radioactive and a toxic, heavy metal. Children who breathe or eat even a small amount can be affected. He said using depleted uranium in Iraq may well cause serious health problems in years to come.

Andrew Kershaw of The Independent graphically described the horrific birth defects of the children in Basra in 2001:

I thought I had a strong stomach - toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children's Hospital in southern Iraq.
Dr Amer, the hospital's director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called congenital anomalies, but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque and thank God they didn't bring out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs.
I won't spare you the details. You should know because - according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organisation, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiralling birth defects in southern Iraq - we are responsible for these obscenities.
During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs for they were scarcely human are the result, Dr Amer said.
He guided me past pictures of children born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose.
Then the chair-grabbing moment - a photograph of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long.

For those born without such defects, Kershaw discovered that there was a dramatic increase in leukemia, and a lack of medication to treat them. If they did not die for lack of the medication, they subsequent died when they ran out of it.

Trust Fund Governor

2012-01-05T18:19:00.004-05:00

People may not realize it, but California Governor Jerry Brown was a trust fund kid before the term became commonly known. Son of former Governor Pat Brown, a man who should rightly be praised for his defense of leftists like Harry Bridges, his opposition to the internment and his commutation of death sentences, the world was open to him, the seminary, UC Berkeley, Yale Law School, studies in Central America and a clerkship with California Supreme Court Justice Matthew Tobriner. He was certainly talented, as he has demonstrated, but as a son of social and financial privilege, he was able to take advantage of opportunities that the rest of us can only imagine.

Furthermore, Brown cultivated an austere demeanor in marked contrast to the profligate stereotype associated with trust fund kids. Paradoxically, it has been this ascetic nature, the reverse side of the trust fund kid coin, that reveals his commonality with his spendthrift brethren, as both are expressions of the freedom from scarcity that defines trust fund status. Accordingly, he has always displayed an insensitivity towards those who depend upon the assistance of others, including the government, for their day to day survival and possible social advancement.

We first encountered it when Brown cynically criticized the Great Society when he ran for governor in 1974, and, then, upon his election, engaged in the small is beautiful exhibitionism of driving a Plymouth and living in a small apartment across for the capital. If everyone lived like me, he seemed to say, they would recognize that poverty is merely a state of mind that can be easily exorcised. Such was the implication of his notorious statement that public sector workers, suffering from the stagflation of the 1970s, should be satisfied with psychic income instead of real material improvements in their lives through collective bargaining.

Now, it is obvious that Jerry Brown 2.0 is merely a variation of the original release. He has balanced the budget on the backs of the poor and education, carrying out the Schwarzenegger blueprint more effectively by eschewing financial public relations gimmicks. He coerced public sector unions to agree to new collective bargaining agreements by and large on terms proposed by Schwarzenegger, and he is now proposing a pension reform substantially based upon increasing the age of retirement for full benefits for new hires to 67 and opening the door to private fund management of some employee contributions. Not surprisingly, prison guards and police officers are exempted from this essentially Republican inspired proposal.

And then, today, Brown released his proposed state budget for the 2012-2013 fiscal year:

Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday proposed more deep cuts to state welfare programs and Medi-Cal next fiscal year, and warned that spending on schools, universities and courts will be reduced by billions if California voters refuse to pass his tax plan in November.
Assuming the tax plan is passed, funding for higher education and courts would remain steady while K-12 schools would get an increase. But if lawmakers approve Brown's plan, spending on the state's welfare-to-work program would be slashed by nearly $1 billion, child care subsidies would be eliminated for 71,000 children and there would be deep reductions to publicly-funded health care.
These are painful reductions - mothers and kids will be getting same welfare check in real dollars that they got in 80's, and the same for the elderly, blind and disabled, Brown said. These are not nice cuts, but that's what it takes to balance the budget.

Jerry Brown has never had kids, never had to rely upon the public educational system for his education, never had to worry about getting retrained in order to reenter the workforce and never had to confront being sick with little or no money. No wonder he displays such a lack of understanding about the struggle of millions of people in this state to stay off the streets, feed themselves and educate their children. He remains, as he has always been, a self-absorbed trust fund kid incapable of maintaining any personal bond with the lived experience of the majority of people in this state. As for the rest of us, there are the haunting words of that prescient Sex Pistols song, No Future.

Death of Gordon Hirabayashi

2012-01-04T14:38:00.006-05:00

Like Fred Korematsu, Hirabayashi refused to compy with President Roosevelt's internment order:

Mr. Hirabayashi, a son of Japanese immigrants, was a senior at the University of Washington when the United States entered World War II. He adhered to the pacifist principles of his parents, who had once belonged to a Japanese religious sect similar to the Quakers.
When the West Coast curfew was imposed, ordering people of Japanese background to be home by 8 p.m., Mr. Hirabayashi ignored it. When the internment directive was put in place, he refused to register at a processing center and was jailed.
Contending that the government’s actions were racially discriminatory, Mr. Hirabayashi proved unyielding. He refused to post $500 bail because he would have been transferred to an internment camp while awaiting trial. He remained in jail from May 1942 until October of that year, when his case was heard before a federal jury in Seattle.
Found guilty of violating both the curfew and internment orders, he was sentenced to concurrent three-month prison terms. While his appeal was pending, he remained at the local jail for an additional four months, then was released and sent to Spokane, Wash., to work on plans to relocate internees when they were finally released.
His appeal, along with one by Mr. Yasui, a lawyer from Hood River, Ore., who had been jailed for nine months for curfew defiance, made its way to the Supreme Court. In 1943, ruling unanimously, the court upheld the curfew as a constitutional exercise of the government’s war powers. Mr. Hirabayashi served out his three-month prison term at a work camp near Tucson.
The Supreme Court declined to rule at the time on Mr. Hirabayashi’s challenge to internment as well. (Mr. Yasui had contested only the curfew.) But in December 1944, in a case brought by Mr. Korematsu, a welder from Oakland, Calif., the court upheld the constitutionality of internment in a 6-to-3 vote.

Not surprisingly, Japanese Americans have played a prominent role in organizing opposition to post-9/11 measures that have resulted in the surveillance, detention and deportation of Muslims. It is also important to remember that the liberal, New Deal Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the internment, and that the Korematsu decision has never been overturned. In other words, it remains a legal precedent that may be invoked by the court in the near future to uphold presidential authority to kill or indefinitely detain people at home or abroad. Interestingly, Hirabayashi was also incarcerated for refusing induction into the military. He refused to renounce allegiance to the Emperor of Japan as required for induction, because he considered it racially discriminatory when no other ethnic groups were required to deny the possibility of loyalty to another country.

NYPD Raids OWS Livestream

2012-01-03T17:03:00.005-05:00

UPDATE 2: Turns out that 7 people were arrested at Grand Central Station. There is also a rumor that the NYPD is about to raid the Manhattan studio as well.

UPDATE 1: So far, only one person has been arrested at the NDAA protest at Grand Central Station. Hopefully, the NYPD will allow the participants to depart.

INITIAL POST: About four hours ago, the NYPD shut down the livestream studio of Global Revolution in Brooklyn, one of the sites of volunteer livestreaming of Occupy Wall Street activity. The reason? Continued occupation of the studio is imminently perilous to life. Curiously, the NYPD allowed everyone else using the building to remain. Meanwhile, the NYPD has already arrested someone participating in a protest against the National Defense Authorization Act, known as the NDAA, at Grand Central Station. For the livestream, go here.

The Origins of Occupy Oakland

2011-12-31T05:46:00.005-05:00

For more background about this, go here and here and here and here.

Reflections on Occupy and Social Media

2011-12-20T14:54:00.010-05:00

NOTE: As mentioned here last Tuesday, Jessica Hollie, also known as BellaEiko, spoke about how we need to stop segregating ourselves through fear for the benefit of the 1%. Just passing it along so that you can see what I experienced.

POST: About five weeks ago, I was stunned by the realization that e-mail is the new snail mail. It came upon me suddenly, as these things so often do when you are older like myself, while I was producing a KDVS program centered around ustreamers of Occupy Oakland. I was trying to reach a ustreamer, BellaEiko, so that I can interview her along with another ustreamer, LaurynG. I posted a message on her ustream site, nothing. There was no e-mail address. What to do?

Of course, BellaEiko has a Twitter account, as she also predictably tweets about Occupy Oakland and Occupy more generally. At this point, it began to dawn on me that Twitter is more than just a social networking site for celebraties to tell all their fans what they ate for breakfast. I had a brief encounter with such an insight previously when someone tweated their critical responses as they read Tony Blair's book, A Journey, last year, but I did not grasp the ramifications of it. Now, I was learning the hard way that it is nearly impossible to reach people involved in occupations initially through phone calls or, when available, e-mail. As far they were concerned, I may as well be living in Kazakhstan. So, I had to face reality: if I wanted to obtain guests involved in Occupy I was going to have to open a Twitter account. I begrudingly did so, and finally reached BellaEiko so that she could participate in the interview.

If you are going to attempt to engage Occupy, you cannot avoid engagement with Twitter and Ustream. Twitter is, in essence, a global chatroom where those at the scene of a general assembly or action rely information to everyone else outside of it. Occupiers also issue calls for assistance through Twitter, as they are retweeted across the Internet. As a consequence, homepages for various occupations have been rendered secondary, usually updated hours or even days after the fact. Homepages now appear to serve the purpose of providing detailed content which then, of course, gets delivered to people through Twitter. Not surprisingly, Facebook serves much the same purpose, but my impression is that Twitter has superceded Facebook as the means by which real time information is disseminated, rendering it more of a vehicle for organizing future activities.

Meanwhile, the participants of Occupy are humanized through Ustream. Ustreamers show every aspect of Occupy through video sent out over the Internet through phones and cameras. Ustreamers shatter the demonized construction of occupiers purveyed in the commercial media by showing them as they speak and act in real time. Jessica Hollie's speech, as presented at the top of this entry, is just one example among many of this phenomenon. OccupyFreedomLA, a ustreamer associated with, of course, Occupy LA, provided another compelling example when she ustreamed a group including herself preparing for a possible police assault by telling each other how to prepare for the possible use of tear gas and stenciling hearts on their hands to display to the officers as a symbol of their commitment to non-violence. One can agree or disagree with the actions of the occupiers in a specific situation, but, through Ustream, they are shown as flesh and blood people in the richness of their social and emotional diversity. The fact that the police have adopted less violent tactics towards Occupy as a consequence of these live presentations of Occupy activities is already well known.

Embedded within this embrace of the accelerated communication capacity of social media liesa number of troubling dilemmas. Practically, there is the problem that the use of social media varies with age. Hence, older people are less likely to understand Occupy because they do not use Twitter, Ustream and Facebook. If anything, I suspect that Facebook would constitute the most likely means of them receiving information about Occupy outside of the commercial media. Beyond this, there is the question as to whether Occupy runs the risk of becoming a virtualized form of reality television as people consider the movement a form of vicarious entertainment. Why go to a general assembly or action when you can stay home and watch it on Ustream? Along these lines, note that interest in police raids upon occupations, as reported through Twitter, seemed to wane if it became apparent that the police were not going to violently attack them.

More abstractly, there is the question as to the personal consequences associated with people processing so much information so rapidly. Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo, maintains that people receive information through communication technologies far beyond their ability to process it over time. Every aspect of our lives, our work, our families and our personal activities, are suffused with this virtual intrusion The result is eventually a feeling of powerlessness and depression, which is expressed either inwardly through withdrawal or self-harm, or outwardly, through violence directed against others, along with an accompanying loss of intimacy. Combined with the pre-existing psychological problems of burnout and depression connected to the exaltation of the activist, a figure encouraged to dedicate all aspects of their life to the movement, much as, paradoxically, executives subordinate their lives to the artifical needs of their corporations, there is a potentially combustible peril here. Yet Occupy is inescapably intertwined with the urgency of social media. One wonders, have the participants of Occupy and the recipients of Occupy's stream of virtual information found a way out of the cul-de-sac described by Bifo? Regardless of the answer, the creative expansion of the uses of social media by Occupy may partially illustrate the integration of the movement with contemporary socioeconomic conditions, rendering it a potentially radically transformative enterprise.

Just Imagine Shutting Down US Military Bases

2011-12-19T10:41:00.001-05:00

March to the Port of Oakland (12/12 at 5:26 AM)

2011-12-17T23:23:00.005-05:00

I went out with this group on Monday morning. I'm the bearded guy in a black raincoat, with a red backpack on his back, holding a sign in the background at 53:21 through 53:26. I should have included this video with my post about the shutdown earlier this week, but just now came across it. OakFoSho was the ustreamer.

Occupy and the Tasks of Socialists

2011-12-15T18:38:00.008-05:00

Leaving aside the fact that I include anarchists among socialists, Pham Binh has written a provocative, insightful evaluation of Occupy from a Marxist perspective. Here is the introductory paragraph:

Occupy is a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-merge the socialist and working class movements and create a viable broad-based party of radicals, two prospects that have not been on the cards in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The socialist left has not begun to think through these big picture implications of Occupy, nor has it fully adjusted to the new tasks that Occupy’s outbreak has created for socialists. In practice, the socialist left follows Occupy’s lead rather than Occupy follow the socialist left’s lead. As a result, we struggle to keep pace with Occupy’s rapid evolution.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) mobilized more workers and oppressed people in four weeks than the entire socialist left combined has in four decades. We would benefit by coming to grips with how and why other forces (namely anarchists) accomplished this historic feat.
The following is an attempt to understand Occupy, review the socialist response, and draw some practical conclusions aimed at helping the socialist left become central rather than remain marginal to Occupy’s overall direction.

Please visit The Unrepentent Marxist and read it in its entirety, as Binh addresses many of the practical issues that have emerged since the movement began.

If anything, Binh may have underestimated the extent to which the old divisions among socialists, between anarchists, Marxists and social democrats, have already begun to wither away. For example, consider my post yesterday about my experience during the West Coast port blockade in this light. Given the prominent role of young people and poor people in the movement, it is not surprising that they are less confined by ideological doctrine, and more influenced by their personal experiences. Hence, an analysis based upon considering Marxists (which is what I believe he really means by use of the term socialist left) and anarchists mutually exclusive, competing left perspectives is dubious. Even so, his practical insights into the operation of the movement are essential to forming an understanding of it.

Binh advocates for the creation of a revolutionary party as a means of carrying the struggle forward. Unfortunately, to the extent that such a proposal originates among Marxists, and is expressed by reference to Marxist language and experience, it is probably likely to be dismissed. But, if presented as a means of coordinating the actions of semi-autonomous groups nationally, centered around an explicitly anti-capitalist perspective, it might get a better reception. Clearly, the proposal for a Joint Committee of Revolutionary Socialists put forward by Socialist Viewpoint is problematic, especially as the proponents seem oblivious to the essential role of anti-authoritarians within the movement. But it does provide a good starting point for discussion of both ideological and practical issues. For example, would increased centralization assist the movement or impair it? Along these lines, recall that the adoption of Leninist forms of organization in both the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers were turned against them with success by law enforcement. Furthermore, it also had the practical effect of suppressing debate that might have allowed both to survive. So, the problem becomes, how does the movement organize itself effectively while retaining much of the openness and spontaneity that has been so integral to its success?

On the Picket Line at the Port of Oakland

2011-12-13T16:04:00.022-05:00

Yesterday morning, I got up at 3:45am, quickly got dressed, and traveled to the West Oakland BART station for the 5:30am march to the Port of Oakland. I exited the station about five minutes late, along with about 30 to 40 other people, which was just in time, because this was an action that required that we cover the approximately two and a half mile distance from the station to the port gates as quickly as possible. As I looked around, I was surprised by the large number of people that had congregated at such an early hour of the day.

The march began shortly thereafter, and I've heard estimates that there were about 1500 and 2000 people walking briskly down the wide boulevard towards the port, accompanied by the screeching woosh of BART trains entering and exiting the Transbay Tube, but around 800 to 1000 seems more likely to me, but then again, the science of estimating the size of crowds is notoriously imprecise. Given that the weather was dank, mid-40s and drizzle, I was impressed. We arrived at one of the gates at about 6:15am, after having another group go to another gate. I'd say about 200 to 300 of us marched in a picket line, while another 100 or so watched and pondered the police presence, which was mild. Shortly thereafter, a couple with a young boy, probably about 4 years old, gave out some raisin cookies to us.

There was a wide array of participaton among the left: the International Socialist Organization, anarchists (including some people from AK Press, naturally), the Industrial Workers of the World Food and Retail Workers Union (also anarchist, from what I have heard), teachers from the Oakland Education Association that endorsed the call, young gays and lesbians (the young radical contingent Feminists & Queers Against Capitalism, plus others upset about the torture of Bradley Manning, with one wearing a Free Bradley Manning sticker on his jacket). As this suggests, there were a lot of young people, a multiracial group of young African Americans, Latinos, whites, gays, lesbians and some Asian Americans, with the young people of color and the anarchists connecting the port shutdown to the killing of Oscar Grant, as it is becoming more and more obvious that his death was a seminal event in the intensified radicalization of young people in Oakland. And, of course, there was Clarence Thomas and some others from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, as well as someone from the Alameda Central Labor Council, along with some older radicals, such as, for example, David Solnit, one of the anti-authoritarian, anti-globalization organizers of Direct Action to Stop the War in 2003. I'm guessing that there were some California Nurses Association people there, too.

Thomas played a prominent role in making sure that everyone remained focused on the purpose of the action. Initially, when we first arrived and set up the picket, some young male anarchists with bandannas got up in the face of the cops and yelled typically insulting, inane things at them. Thomas and other ILWU people got on that right away, telling the organizers that these guys were doing stupid bullshit and needed to stop. They did. My impression was that the ISO participated in the planning and organization for the event instead of limiting themselves to proselytizing from the outside. The ISO people, along with others, communicated information and told people what needed to done (please touch the curb, we have to do that for it to be a legal picket). So, the anarchists and the ISO must be getting along. There's a lot of cross-pollination associated with Occupy Oakland, as the young organizers come from a variety of groups.

I can't say this from personal knowledge, but it looks like the ILWU workers in the port supported the action, if you measure it by the fact that it was reported that none crossed the community picket. The more challenging issue is the extent to which the blockade required truck drivers, employed as independent contractors, to sacrifice for the possibility of better wages and working conditions in the future as well as for other workers, like the ILWU ones in Longview. Predictably, the commercial media made much of the displeasure of drivers not being able to enter the port, but there were other organizations of drivers that expressed support for the action by reference to their demeaning working conditions, such as, for example, their low pay and lack of any rest room facilities.

As the sun rose, the mood in front of the gate was festive. We are unstoppable, another world is possible. Someone brought a speaker in a carriage attached to their bike, and Bloq Capital cranked up some hip hop, power pop and funk in the center of the circular picket line. Along with a young lesbian flag team, they set up an impromptu dance club. I know Louis Proyect over at The Unrepentant Marxist looks askance at this sort of thing, but, when you are walking around slowly in a circle in cold weather, as we were yesterday, it really picks up your spirit, which it did in this instance. Humorously, the line went crazy over their energetic dancing to The Go-Gos We've Got the Beat, and joined in. A few of the cops smiled. I suspect that I will always think of this protest whenever I hear that song again. It was all part of a cultural effort to subvert the power and authority of the police, a subject that I may post a brief blog entry about if I find the time. And then We've Got the Beat faded into the ferocity of Le Tigre's New Kicks, a powerful, now nostalgic 2003 anthem given a new importance by yet another manifestation of the same struggle, and the dancers chanted in unison with the lyrics, This is What Democracy Looks Like! This is What Democracy Sounds Like! And as the song wound down, everyone yelled, We say no to war! No war! We say no to war! No war! It was one of those epiphanies when, for the briefest of moments, our most fervent dreams became real.

At around 10:30am, the organizers announced that the arbitrator had determined that the picket made it unsafe for ILWU wokers to enter the port, effectively closing the port for the morning shift, and we thereafter departed. As you probably already know, the ILWU could not endorse the blockade, but can refuse to cross a community picket line. For me, the striking aspect of the blockade was the participation of so many young people and their organizational skills. Of course, one should avoid exaggeration, an action like this is going to primarily attract leftists, but the mere fact that they are willing to publicly engage in such militant political activity is significant. There is something important happening here generationally, a willingness of some people under 30 to embrace anti-capitalist social perspectives and act upon them.

Beyond the more common chants of the We are the 99% kind, here are a few of the more distinctive ones specific to Oakland that rippled through the crowd as we returned to the West Oakland BART station:

Labor, Black and Brown, Oakland is a Union Town
Fuck the Police, From Oakland to Greece
We are the Proletariat
Oscar Grant Didn't Have to Die, Shot Him in the Back, Wouldn't Look Him in the Eye

All of them reflect the multiethnic working class synergy that is emerging in Oakland, a synergy generated from concrete social conditions, such as, obviously, the brutality of the Oakland Police Department and the BART police, and the harshness of their economic distress. At a small rally upon our return to Oscar Grant Plaza, Jessica Hollie, an Occupy Oakland activist and ustreamer from East Oakland, gave a brief, passionate speech about how the 1% is impoverishing everyone by separating us through fear, fear of places like West Oakland, East Oakland and Richmond. For them, she said, we are all the same, all they care about is how they enrich themselves at our expense. She emphasized the urgency of working together, declaring I care about you, and I hope you care about me. In this, she touched upon the essential need for collective organization and emotional support as an alternative to the current predatory economic system. Earlier, on the way back from the port, I saw a man poignantly express something similar with a poignant sign that said, After the Banks Fail, We Still Have Each Other. Leftists must engage this need for mutual support during a time of crisis that if we are to have any future relevance.

12/12 West Coast Port Blockade (Part 2)

2011-12-09T22:59:00.004-05:00

On Monday, the first march to the Port of Oakland will start at 5:30am from the nearby West Oakland BART station, with subsequent afternoon marches to the port at 4:00pm and 5:00pm. In Long Beach, people will meet at Harry Bridges Park at 5:00am and march to the SSA Marine terminal. In Portland, people will congregate at Kelley Point Park for a 6:00am rally and 7:00am blockade. In Seattle, people will meet at Westlake Park at 1:00pm and march to the Port of Seattle. In San Diego, people will gather at Chicano Park at 6am for a march to the port. And these are just some of the planned actions.

In the Bay Area, the organizing efforts for the blockade have been extraordinary:

Shrugging off tent removal, tear gas and rubber bullets, Occupy Oakland has become the nucleus of coordination, holding inter-Occupy conference calls; brainstorming budgets to provide camps with everything from porta-potties to bullhorns; and using union networks to connect rank-and-file members with general assemblies on the West Coast.
Hundreds of Oakland citizens are leafletting commuter trains, staging rush-hour banner drops, reaching out to non-unionized workers, and sending out bilingual teams to ethnic boroughs to help populate the blockade. Other local organizations are independently working for the event. For example, the International Socialist Organization immediately began contacting branches in relevant cities while the East Bay Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice will be hosting a pre-march teach-in about the plight of longshoremen and port truckers.

And, one of the consequences of this effort has been pressure within unions to respond to this radical current:

Barucha says the democratization paradigm of the leaderless occupation movement is proving to be a model for workers unhappy with the status quo.
This is the first time there has been an exemplary movement that is encouraging and teaching people to self-organize. The occupation, she said, allows union members to act as individual community participants and create community pickets, alongside the unemployed, the non-unionized working class, the homeless and any other supportive neighbors that share the same material needs.
One Bay Area couple who belong to another big local union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, said they and some other grocers chose to organize after watching their contracts being written up behind closed doors. The couple, who asked not to be identified, said the UFCW leaders negotiated a pension concession that they could opt out of by accepting other concessions.

No wonder Democratic mayors across the country have cracked down on Occupy Together. Effective organizing from the bottom up is the most serious threat to the Labor/Democratic Party/Corporate triumvirate in many years. For example, consider this effort by Occupy Oakland tomorrow in the impoverished neighborhood adjacent to the port:

10:00 am-11:00am: Activists and community members from across West Oakland and beyond will gather in DeFremery park for outreach training about the Port Blockade Action.
11:00 am-1:00 pm: Groups will disperse from the park to engage Oakland community members in real conversation around why the West Coast Port Blockade is crucial to achieving solidarity with the working class who live next to and work in the Port of Oakland.

Of course, people have participated in such efforts for decades. The novelty lies in the number of people involved this time and the intensity of their motivation. For more information about the blockade, go here.

The Fourth Reich

2011-12-06T14:31:00.005-05:00

Too bad Fassbinder is no longer with us. Few, if any, so astutely recognized the perseverance of fascist values in postwar Germany, sublimated in the guise of the bourgeois values of work and frugality than he did, with its attendant consequences resulting from the suppression of the libido. In films like The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, he addressed the joyful, contradictory features of contemporary capitalism, one defined by the duality of austerity and excess. Through the character of Maria Braun, a smart, savvy women, who, reminscent of Scarlett O'Hara during Reconstruction, exploits the entreprenuerial spirit of the time to rise to great heights during the German economic miracle of the 1950s, he prefigured the rise of Merkel.

In Katzelmacher, Fassbinder exposed the enduring German sense of racial superiority in regard to the peoples of southern Europe, and the sexual jealousies connected to it, dramatized by means of the hostility of the young German working class characters to the Greek immigrant, Jurgos. Such attitudes have been on prominent display during the current Eurozone crisis, with Germans and the German media purveying crude stereotypes about the purportedly profligate Greeks so as to justify the colonization of the country by financial interests aligned with the German state. Merkel's proposal for a new Eurozone is based upon implicitly bigoted assumptions about countries like Italy and Greece, as revealed through the notion that Germans, through the administrative processes of the European Union, must seize power from them and act as their firm, disciplinarian parents.

12/12 West Coast Port Blockade (Part 1)

2011-12-05T23:49:00.006-05:00

From the Occupy Oakland website:

As of November 27, 2011, the Occupy movement in every major West Coast port city: Occupy LA, Occupy San Diego, Occupy Portland, Occupy Tacoma, Occupy Seattle have joined Occupy Oakland in calling for and organizing a coordinated West Coast Port Blockade and Shutdown on December 12, 2011. Other West Coast Occupies, including Occupy Anchorage and Vancouver, Canada are planning to join the economic blockade and disruption of the 1% on that date, according to organizers.
We’re shutting down these ports because of the union busting and attacks on the working class by the 1%: the firing of Port truckers organizing at SSA terminals in LA; the attempt to rupture ILWU union jurisdiction in Longview, WA by EGT. EGT includes Bunge LTD, a company which reported 2.5 billion dollars in profit last year and has economically devastated poor people in Argentina and Brazil. SSA is responsible for inhumane working conditions and gross exploitation of port truckers and is owned by Goldman Sachs. EGT and Goldman Sachs is Wallstreet on the Waterfront stated Barucha Peller of the West Coast Port Blockade Assembly of Occupy Oakland.

It is important to understand that the port blockade, like the last one in Oakland on November 2nd, has been predominately called for the express purpose of supporting the struggles of workers involved in transport. Occupy Oakland has provided an exemplary example in regard to recognizing the interrelationship between race, poverty and the exploitation of workers.

Philip Glass Addresses Occupy Wall Street

2011-12-04T21:52:00.003-05:00

As someone who has unapologetically appreciated minimalism, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Philip Glass addressed Occupy Wall Street on Thursday:

If my memory serves me correctly, Glass has lived on the Lower East Side, one of the most socially and politically radical neighborhoods in the US, for many years.

The Hidden Abuse of Occupy LA Detainees

2011-12-03T18:30:00.003-05:00

From an article by Yasha Levine in The Exiled:

While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that a lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple:
* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.
* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.

Levine's account highlights how people in positions of authority rely upon sadism to abuse those who participate in protest movements that threaten established economic interests. He concludes that the order to treat the detainees in this fashion came from the highest levels, probably from Police Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Of course, poor people and people of color aren't surprised, they've been treated this way for decades.

Iranian Students Attack UK Embassy

2011-11-29T12:42:00.002-05:00

One of the students involved made this statement on al-Jazeera:

We are here to close the UK embassy forever as this place is like the US embassy a centre for spying and should be shut down.

Such as statement is overwhelmingly likely to be true, given that the US no longer has an official diplomatic presence in the country. Furthermore, there are interesting reports to the effect that students have seized documents of UK involvement in covert activities inside the country. For example, students are studying documents to determine if the UK was involved in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari.

It is tempting to consider the assault as an action instigated by the Iranian government, but the country's semi-official news agency has characterized the protesters as self-motivated. Plausible deniability, perhaps, but it is worth considering the alternative, that the students, motivated by increasingly aggressive efforts to economically punish Iran in an effort to force the country to abandon its nuclear research program, and, inspired by the confrontational protests in North Africa and the Middle East, most recently in Egypt, planned the assault on their own, independent of the government. The Egyptian assault upon the Israeli embassy in Cairo this summer serves as a model for what transpired today. Government security officers may have learned of it by monitoring social media, but allowed it to go forward, greenlighting it through passivity.

If so, the action is yet another example of how restive populations throughout the region are seizing the initiative, with young people in the forefront. Even the tried and true pronouncements of anti-imperialism by the Iranian regime carries within them the prospect of social unrest, as students insist upon carrying such pronouncements to their logical conclusion. Of course, there is an incessant din of diplomatic condemnations, but they will not drown out revelations of UK covert operations in Iran if the students find evidence of them. If they find UK complicity in the assassination of Shahriari or participation in other operations, such as involvement with Jundallah, an organization known for carrying out suicide bombings inside Iran, then the students will have done the world a great service.

Egypt Erupts (Part 15)

2011-11-26T04:45:00.003-05:00

According to Jack Shenker of the Guardian:

Seven straight days of deadly violence can quickly reshape political realities, and Washington is not the only place where support for Scaf appears to be rapidly deteriorating. In the early afternoon, two officers appeared on a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square and led chants against Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Scaf's leader and their own commander-in-chief. They joined a small but expanding group of mid-ranking officers who have effectively defected in recent days and allied themselves with the protesters.
I want the people to know there are army officers who are with them, Major Tamer Samir Badr told the Guardian. My feelings came to a head last week when I saw people dying, and the army gave the orders for us to just stand and watch. I'm supposed to die for these people, not them die for me. Now I'm ready to die in the square, and I'm not afraid of anything.
Speaking next to an open window that looked out on to Tahrir and which Badr insisted was left open so that he could hear the crowds, the 37-year-old claimed that many other officers had been attending the protests secretly in civilian clothes. Scaf is composed of 19 generals and they are the ones who have power in this country. But those 19 are nothing compared to the thousands of people in the forces. I demand that the field marshal hand over power to a civilian government immediately, and that he just leave," he said.

UC Davis Students Call for Strike on 11/28

2011-11-21T17:54:00.010-05:00

UPDATE 4: According to Richard Chang, a reporter for the California Aggie, UC Davis has announced that police from UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and Sacramento State have been called onto campus as a precaution. They are backup, and located at a staging area away from the Quad.

UPDATE 3: 60 to 70 tents on the Quad, with more going up, plus a geodesic dome under construction.

UPDATE 2: The UC Davis English Department calls for the resignation of Katehi and the disbanding of the UC Davis police department on its official UC Davis website:

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus. Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis.

UPDATE 1: Tents going up along the centennial walkway of the Quad. A subsequent proposal at today's general assembly calling for disbanding the UC Davis police department failed with only 60% support. 80% or 90% has been commonly required for approval of a proposal at an Occupy Together assembly. There will be another general assembly tomorrow morning at 11am to commence planning for the 11/28 strike.

INITIAL POST: After a large rally on the Quad today in response to the pepper spray assault last Friday, with an estimated crowd in excess of 5,000 people, the remaining students conducted a general assembly. Upon discussing a proposal for a campus wide strike on Monday, November 28th, the students approved it by a vote of 1,720 yes votes, 6 in opposition with 20 absentions, a margin of nearly 300 to 1.

Chancellor Katehi spoke at the rally, but the students conditioned her appearance upon submission to the rules applied to all other speakers, rules that required her to stand in line and limit her remarks to one minute. She apologized for the pepper spray incident and asserted that she had to earn their trust. Students ran after her as she walked to her car, with many of them yelling don't come back. Earlier in the day, she appeared on Good Morning America and refused to resign because the university needs me. I called the Chancellor's Office to express my displeasure with such narcissism, which I did as politely as possible, resulting in a warm thank you very much from the receptionist. Apparently, the students are not the only ones who have experienced Katehi's imperious manner.

Egypt Erupts (Part 14)

2011-11-21T14:31:00.011-05:00

UPDATE: Protesters battle their way towards the Interior Ministry:

INITIAL POST: Street battles have erupted in central Cairo as protesters in opposition to the post-Mubarak military government engage in confrontations with the security forces. From the Guardian:

• Thirty-three people are reported to have been killed in the violence over the past three days according to morgue officials. The ministry of health said more than 1,500 have been injured in the latest clashes in and around Tahrir Square - the worst bout of violence in Egypt since the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. Witnesses said protesters had been hit by rubber bullets and suffocated with aggressive tear gas. Video has been circulating of police apparently beating protesters, including some lying on the ground. The International Federation for Human Rights accused the policemen of using live ammunition on protesters. Reports indicated that demonstrators were responding by hurling stones and molotov cocktails.
• Crowds in Tahrir Square have been growing and clashes continuing as night has fallen in the Egyptian capital. Riot police are continuing to fire teargas and casualties continue to be taken to the field hospital Chants have called for the trial or execution of Scaf head Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.
• The Revolutionary Youth Movement has called for a one million man march in the capital and across the country tomorrow. Other groups have reportedly echoed the call.

According to Jack Shenker of the Guardian, more people are going out into the streets to battle the security forces and the revolt is spreading beyond Cairo:

Major unrest spread beyond Cairo to the large cities of Suez and Alexandria, where at least one leading activist was killed. Mass demonstrations and attacks on police stations were reported in several other towns throughout the Nile delta and southern Egypt.

His account of the street battles on Saturday is striking:

Throughout Saturday, protesters fought running battles with central security forces – a hated symbol of brutality under the Mubarak dictatorship.
Motorbikes ferried hundreds of wounded civilians to a makeshift field hospital on the edge of Tahrir Square, where a handful of doctors, helped by volunteers, struggled to deal with the influx.
We are seeing many patients suffering from severe gas inhalation and flesh wounds from different types of ammunition, Amr Wageeh, a 21-year-old medical student, said.
I've been here four hours and helped treat over 100 in that time – it's hard because the teargas that's being used is stronger than what we've dealt with in the past and appears resistant to [the normal remedies of] vinegar and soda.

An al-Jazeera report yesterday reflects the intensity of the street violence that has erupted in Cairo:

According to Hossam el-Hamalawy, a general strike will be necessary to topple the post-Mubarak military regime:

As el-Hamalawy explained in his al-Jazeera interview, the military has governed Egypt as an extension of Mubarak in order to preserve the economic privileges Mubarak awarded them. They have also labored to preserve the 1978 peace treaty with Egypt despite public opposition to it. Not surprisingly, the United States, as noted by As'ad Abukhalil, has been silent on the violence in Egypt:

In 3 days in Egypt, the government of Tantawi has managed to butcher 30 Egyptians and injure more than a 1000. Yet, there is no uproar in the Arab League or the UN. The US and EU--make no mistake about it--are complicit all in order to save your precious peace treaty with Israel.

Hence, the US sells the Egyptian military the tear gas that it uses against the protesters.

The Perp Walk of UC Davis Chancellor Katehi

2011-11-20T10:51:00.016-05:00

UPDATE 3: I received a very interesting e-mail this afternoon, with more background about this protest. Apparently, the students had the building surrounded during the press conference, and, after it was prematurely terminated, Katehi was fearful. Amazingly, a campus minister had to negotiate her departure. Students assured her that Katehi could exit without concern for safety, but they were insistent that Katehi face them. They were not going to allow to her leave without subjecting her to a withering public embarrassment. The account answers a couple of curious aspects of the protest. First, it explains how the students were able to position themselves along the route to Katehi's SUV. They were able to do it, because they dictated the route of her exit. Second, as Katehi walks along the line of students, someone asks her, are you still afraid of the students? One might initially believe that the question was prompted by the university's claim that the officers had to resort to the use of pepper spray to escape from a dangerous situation. But, instead, Katehi's fear of the noisy student protesters outside the media center provoked it.

UPDATE 2: I talked with one of my friends in Davis and obtained a little more information about this protest. Upon learning of Katehi's press conference, students went to the media center and disrupted it from outside with noisy chants, requiring her to cut it off early. She then, as noted by the Bee, waited inside the center for more than two hours in the forlorn expectation that she might be able to leave without confronting them.

UPDATE 1: The original YouTube video of the pepper spray incident posted here early Friday evening has been accessed over 745,000 times, with in excess of 15,000 comments. The one that I subsequently posted has been accessed over 55,000 times.

INITIAL POST:

As reported by the Sacramento Bee, Katehi walked through the silent student gauntlet after waiting for two hours in a media room in the misguided hope that she could avoid the assembled students:

After an afternoon press conference, Katehi said she had no intention of resigning and holed up in a media room for more than two hours while hundreds of students gathered outside, some carrying signs calling for her to resign.
At 6:50 p.m. Katehi left the building, walking to an awaiting SUV through lines of students that stretched two to three blocks. There was no exchange of words between her and the students, and the scene got very quiet as she passed.

Upon her departure, the students celebrated:

One gets the impression that the protest was spontaneous, one spread almost entirely by word of mouth through social media. Someone on campus encountered the media presence, asked what was up, and upon learning that Katehi was going to have a press conference, spread the word. It is possible that someone inside the campus administration leaked the information. In any event, the protest was an extraordinary achievement, an inversion of the power relations of the campus, as Katehi slowly walked helplessly passed along a seemingly endless of line of students, with many of them videotaping her humiliation for posterity. Every step along the way must have been agonizing. But there is no question that she deserved it. She initially defended the actions of the UC Davis Police Department without reservation, and only changed course after an explosion of public outrage. Hopefully, she'll be gone in the next few days.

New Oakland Occupation Underway at 19th and Telegraph (5:19 PM PST)

2011-11-19T20:18:00.016-05:00

UPDATE 3 (November 20th, 10:09 AM PST): The Oakland Police Department removes the encampment without resistance, then closes off the park to the media as a crime scene. There is also an Occupy Oakland Twitter feed here. There is a report that the Snow Park encampment along Lake Merritt has been served with an eviction notice as well.

UPDATE 2 (6;05 PM PST): A live, long angle ustream here from ryanjarvinen. People are dancing to Sheila E. She don't need a man's touch. Without love, it ain't much. Whurring sounds of helicopters in the background. East Bay Express reporting over 500 people and 13 tents in the park.

UPDATE 1 (5:50 PM PST): Both tents and police helicopters are proliferating. Rumors of a police raid at Snow Park about a mile away on the shore of Lake Merritt.

INITIAL POST (5:19 PM PST): People have taken down the fences around the park at 19th and Telegraph and there are now about 2000 people inside the park. Loud new school soul is playing as part of the celebratory, dance party atmosphere. 3 Oakland police department helicopters are shining lights on the park. OakFoSho has a live ustream here. You can also keep track of events on Twitter here. Occupy Oakland brings MST style land seizures to the United States.

Police Pepper Spray Occupation at UC Davis

2011-11-18T22:22:00.026-05:00

UPDATE 5: From the Sacramento Bee:

Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi said she would address the campus on Monday.
After an afternoon press conference, Katehi said she had no intention of resigning and holed up in a media room for more than two hours while hundreds of students gathered outside, some carrying signs calling for her to resign.
At 6:50 p.m. Katehi left the building, walking to an awaiting SUV through lines of students that stretched two to three blocks. There was no exchange of words between her and the students, and the scene got very quiet as she passed.

Please go, please go now.

UPDATE 4: Don't Shoot Students! Don't Shoot Students . . . Close Your Eyes! Protect Your Eyes! Protect Yourself! Another YouTube video of the incident:

UPDATE 3: Just got off the phone with someone from the UC Davis police department after providing contact information earlier this morning for a criminal complaint, which will, of course, be disregarded. Having attended the university, I expressed my outrage as calmly as possible. I got a sense that the officer taking my call wasn't too pleased what happened, either, as we were both familiar with past UC Davis acceptance of occupations, such as the one during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. Poor guy. He's spending all morning responding to belligerent calls, and said that I was one of the most polite people that he's spoken with. It is contemptible that the Chancellor Katehi and the UC Davis Chief of Police Spicuzza put their employees in this position, just another indication of how little people like the Chancellor and the Chief care about the 99%.

UPDATE 2: Loyal American Leftist readers will remember this post from April concerning the UC Davis Student Activism Team. Here's an excerpt from a California Aggie article about it:

The team provides a presence at campus actions, accompanies students as they move, monitors the situation and updates a team coordinator until the action ends, according to a document dated Nov. 1, 2010 detailing the team’s protocol. The team is not to stop student activism, stop police response, speak on behalf of the administration or make decisions about campus response. Documents also reveal correspondences between team members and the police about planned protests and unfolding campus action.

Of course, the purported purpose of the team is public safety, including the safety of protesters, But, as graduate student Eric Lee presciently observed when the existence of the team was revealed: . . [a] police presence only creates the opportunity for violence . . . the only time time protesters have been injured on campus was at the hands of police officers. One wonders, what was the team doing yesterday? Inquiring minds would like to know.

UPDATE 1: For additional video of the incident, go here. Amazingly, UC Davis is defending the actions of the officers by saying that they feared for their safety. Curiously, they didn't look very frightened as UC Davis police lieutenant John Pike calmly sprayed the students again and again. Indeed, Pike's spraying of the students actually inflamed the situation.

INITIAL POST:

I arrived at UC Davis at 4:45pm shortly after today this afternoon for my public affairs program on KDVS 90.3 FM at 5. At that time, there were a couple of fire engines on the far side of the Quad, where a crowd of about 100 people had gathered, to provide medical assistance to the victims if necessary. Upon entering the station, I encountered a KDVS reporter who told me and a friend what had happened. We went on the air at 5, and she described the background of the UC Davis occupation and this pepper spray assault.

I just encountered this YouTube video of the incident online a few minutes ago, and decided to post it here. As I watched it, I was, in addition to the shockingly cavalier attitude of the officer who sprayed the students, surprised to see the officers become increasingly uncomfortable in their new role as riot cops as the crowd became angrier and angrier after the students were sprayed. UC Davis cops don't have experience with intimidating methods of crowd control like urban ones. They draw in closer and closer together, hunching down as they make their departure to hostile chants of you can go! you can go! Beyond this, It is important to recognize that, if they will do this at UC Davis, they will do it anywhere. Normally, campus authorities would have taken a mellow, understated approach to this situation. But, given the national importance of the movement, that's not possible anymore. Significantly, the video went up online within a couple of hours of the assault.

Over 3,900 Occupy Together Arrests in the US Since 9/24

2011-11-17T23:08:00.010-05:00

UPDATE 2: Another Democracy Now! gem:

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Stephen Graham into the discussion right now. We started speaking to him yesterday. He wrote the book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Just in from Britain, in Philadelphia. Can you talk about—as we were just speaking with the former police chief, Norm Stamper, of Seattle, and he oversaw the Battle of Seattle, how the police dealt with that—the militarization that we are seeing of police forces around our country?
STEPHEN GRAHAM: Yes, well, it’s a longstanding process that has its roots in policies against drug use. It has its roots in the development of SWAT teams, Special Weapons and Tactics teams, and it has its use in some of the responses to the 1960s disturbances across the West, as well. And really, the effects of this, as we see in New York and elsewhere, is an increasing use of full-on riot squads, increasing use of non-lethal weapons, including things like acoustic systems that make it impossible for people to remain in spaces, including the pepper spray, including the tasers. And we have to remember, this is a really big growth industry that military and security corporations are investing heavily in terms of new research and development.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Stephen Graham, what’s the market? You’re talking about a growth industry. What are we talking about here in terms of investment of dollars by—because there are so many, obviously, municipalities in the United States with their own police forces?
STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, I mean, globally speaking, the so-called homeland security market is a real—is in real boom town—boom time, excuse me. I mean, in a world where actual defense contracts are often being reduced, a lot of the big companies are moving into civilian applications. They’re moving into these non-lethal weapons, moving into all of the technologies of crowd control and civilian disturbance control. And that has to be added to, of course, the much bigger markets that are growing in terms of broader questions of surveillance and security for buildings, for cities, for special events, as we see these systems established more and more in terms of everyday spaces and everyday bits of cities. So, I haven’t got figures at hand, I’m afraid, but it’s multibillion-dollar markets that are projected to grow globally at very, very high rates over the next 15 years, according to some of the recent market research reports.

Graham addresses these subjects more thoroughly in his book mentioned by Goodman, Cities Under Siege. As he observes in this brief interview, surveillance and security are emerging as a major feature of capital accumulation, with the US, the UK and Israel in the forefront. The emergence and persistence of Occupy Wall Street is likely to induce even more concentrated investment in them. His scholarship is groundbreaking, providing an essential insight into contemporary social conditions, and, if you are interested, you can watch him speak on this topic and other related ones in a YouTube video.

UPDATE 1: Democracy Now! is providing extensive coverage of Occupy Wall Street, which I highly recommend. Here's a compelling example, an on the scene report of the brutality of the early morning raid of Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning:

PROTESTERS: We are the 99 percent! You are the 99 percent!
AARON MATÉ: Tell us your name, if you want to, and then what happened.
ALEX HALL: My name is Alex Hall. And I basically heard a tip from reporters. They were outside the park about an hour before it happened. And we asked them, Hey, what’s going on? And they said that cops were planning on, you know, clearing the whole park out.
So, you know, an hour later, they basically surrounded the park, at least 100 to 200 cops, and with the shields on there across their faces. And they basically put up—they put up huge beams of light into the park, on every side. They had about three beams on every side of the park. Got super bright. And they came with a loudspeaker. There was a ton of them, at least 100 to 200. And they lined up in front of the park, on all sides of the park, where they lined up in the front, on Trinity Avenue. And they came with the loudspeaker. They said, Listen, we’re going to need you guys to clear the park. We’re going to take out the tents and get the sanitation team in here. And you can come back to the park without your tents. You won’t be able to have your tents in the park.
And they basically started pushing people. They started tearing down tents. They started to break them down, and without even checking if anybody was in the tents. But they started pushing everybody around. Every—
AARON MATÉ: Without checking if anybody was inside the tents, they started just breaking them down?
ALEX HALL: They basically started pulling them and stepping on them, yeah. And everybody started to leave the park. And this is where we are, basically. Everybody kind of rushed out. They started pepper-spraying people. I got—I have milk here. I actually was helping somebody get the spray out of their eyes. And this is where we are right now.
POLICE OFFICER 1: Please clear the street and the sidewalk!
AARON MATÉ: Where are we supposed to go? Where do we go?
POLICE OFFICER 2: Don’t block the street.
POLICE OFFICER 1: Keep the area closed so pedestrians and vehicles can go.
AARON MATÉ: There was a confrontation over here. So now we’re still on the sidewalk, and police are pushing these protesters back. They told us to get off the street, so people complied, and now we’re being pushed further and further away from Zuccotti Park, from Liberty Plaza, where just moments ago protesters were cleared.
Hey, Hero. What’s going on?
HERO VINCENT: We’re sitting here. They’re trying to block us. They’re pushing us to the wall. I got pepper-sprayed straight in the face. You see, I’m still looking. They can’t stop me. They can’t stop us. This is a sign. He pepper-sprayed me, straight like that. You see this? You see this? Twice. Twice I’m pepper-sprayed, and I’m still looking at you, [inaudible] and clear. Sure and clear, I’m still staring at you. That’s a sign that they can’t stop us, that we all see what’s really going on and that they can’t blind us. They can’t pull wool over our eyes. They can’t put nothing in our eyes that’s going to blind what’s going on here. And the same goes for all the people who are out there.
AARON MATÉ: Where were you when the police first moved in?
HERO VINCENT: I was two blocks away, two blocks away, didn’t know what was going on. And then I got a phone call. Where are you at? We’re being raided. So I had to run, to this, straight into this.
AARON MATÉ: And what do you tell people right now?
HERO VINCENT: What do I tell people? That this is ridiculous. Soon, soon, we’re coming back. They’re not leaving. That’s—get that straight right now. We’re not going nowhere. A lot of us is going to be here overnight. A lot of us will be here for the rest of the week. A lot of us will be here until the new year comes. A lot of us will be here ’til we see a new day, and that will—you can quote me on that.
AARON MATÉ: So tell me what happened.
PROTESTER 1: I was standing on the outside of the crowd. They started really beating up on this girl pretty badly with their riot shields. And while people tried to pull her out, they sprayed pepper sprayed like directly into this little clump of people. I was right on the side, but I’m OK.
AARON MATÉ: So what’s going on now is a familiar scene. We’re getting pushed farther and farther away from Zuccotti Park. At every block, police are saying to protesters, You have the choice to be arrested or move further and further away.
POLICE OFFICER 3: You’ve got to move right now, or you’re going to be arrested! If you don’t move out of here right now, you’re going to be arrested.
AARON MATÉ: Where do they move to? Where do they move to?
POLICE OFFICER 3: Let’s go! Let’s go! Push this out! Push this out!
AARON MATÉ: So, this commanding officer right here, telling everyone to push people further away. Now looks like everyone on the inside here is going to be—is going to be arrested. Look, somebody arrested right in front of me.
PROTESTERS: Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!
AARON MATÉ: So now we’re back where we started off, a block from Zuccotti Park. When we got here, there were throngs of demonstrators, protesting the raiding of Zuccotti Park, Liberty Plaza. They were pushed further and further away. Activists that were on the sidewalk were told to keep moving down. And they were asking, Where should we go? And they were just told to move. What we witnessed was a very forceful interaction, with police even refusing to tolerate activists staying on the sidewalk. Obviously wanted to get people as far away from Zuccotti Park as possible. And so now we’re seeing these trucks behind us pulling away. They have arrested many people. And so, as we tried to come back here to this area, just a block from Zuccotti Park, we spoke to one of the activists that had been arrested.
Hey, tell me what happened.
ARRESTED PROTESTER: I was being pushed and shoved, and I had no way to move. And the lady firsthand singled me out and pinned me down and said, Her. Arrest her. Pushed me facedown into the sidewalk, and now I’m arrested.
PROTESTERS: New York, Cairo, Wisconsin! Push us down, we’ll rise again!
AARON MATÉ: So tell us what happened.
PROTESTER 2: It’s your typical break-up of any protest, some a bit more peaceful done than a little bit others. I mean, bottom line is, during the day, the officers started—ended up putting on their gear—kind of first inquiry that something might happen. Then all of the vendors that were around shut up and closed like any other given day, like they were all closing up, but they all did it at once. Something was going on. Next thing you know, we’re told to leave the park. Fliers are being handed out, tell us the reasons of which why and that the tents got to go, grab our belongings, vacate as quickly as possible. Then the bullhorn started coming on. People started—the announcements started coming. If you’re going to go, go ahead and go. If you’re going to stand and you’re going to hold our ground, they’re going to be in the kitchen area. So they all are in a soft lock arm right now.
AARON MATÉ: How many are in there right now?
PROTESTER 2: I’m going to say there’s roughly about, give or take, 250.
AARON MATÉ: Protesters. Then how many police?
PROTESTER 2: I’m going to say there’s maybe three police officers, at least, for every protester.
AARON MATÉ: And tell us what you saw with the tents. We were hearing that police had announced they were coming in to clear the tents.
PROTESTER 2: From my visual observations, from what I can tell, simply, they would push in a little bit—sorry—they would push in a little bit, and they would start ripping tents out.
PROTESTER 3: The NYPD has no idea what they’ve done. This is—this is the worst possible action they could have taken before the anniversary, because this is either going to sway in different—this is definitely going to sway in different people. And that’s what it boils down to. Everyone who is out there that saw this on TV and said it was no big deal and that we were just goofing around, do you think the NYPD would have destroyed our camp if we were just goofing around, if we weren’t some sort of threat to them? We are a health and safety risk? We have doctors and medics in there assessing the situation at all times. If there was any health or safety risk, we would have handled it. We had our own—we have our own fire department. We have our own security team. We have our own medic team—certified EMTs, doctors and nurses, ready to help. Sanitation crews, cleaning the park 24/7, they never stop. We were never a health or safety risk, nor were we a fire hazard. Every tent, almost every tent, had a fire extinguisher in them. So, don’t believe their lies.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to George, who’s locked down in the park right now. Can you tell us how many people are there? This is Amy from Democracy Now!, by the way. So, and just say then—tell us everything that is happening. We’re recording what you’re saying. Just one sec. Go ahead.
GEORGE: My name George [inaudible]. I’m in the park right now. I am in the kitchen right now. The cops have arrived in the kitchen. OK, there’s about maybe 150 to 200 surrounding us in the kitchen. Our chanting going on. They’ve cut down some trees [inaudible].
AMY GOODMAN: So, what’s happened with the tents, and have people locked arms?
GEORGE: Yes, people have locked arms around us in the kitchen. And then, [inaudible] behind the people locked [inaudible] and people locked around—lock their arms [inaudible] I think behind when the people locked arms [inaudible].
AARON MATÉ: All right, so now we’re right in front of these dump trucks that are taking away protesters’ belongings. They have dismantled the tents. And we’ve seen these lines of police just throwing away the belongings of protesters. And now, this one right here in front of us is full to the brim. It’s packed with protesters’ belongings.
MATT BALDWIN: The cops are beating people!
LIZ BALDWIN: They are beating people!
AARON MATÉ: What’s going on? What’s going on?
MATT BALDWIN: The police are beating the people with billy clubs now—
LIZ BALDWIN: The police are beating up. They are ripping them down.
MATT BALDWIN: —who are chain-linked. The people are chain-locked like this. The cops are beating them with billy clubs.
LIZ BALDWIN: They’re beating them with sticks! They’re dragging them!
MATT BALDWIN: And they’re coming in, and they’re jabbing them with poles and beating them with billy clubs.
LIZ BALDWIN: They’re not—they’re not giving up.
MATT BALDWIN: And they’re dangerous. They’re hitting women. They’re hitting children. They’re hitting everyone.
AARON MATÉ: Talk about what you saw. Talk about what you saw.
MATT BALDWIN: Talk about it? Yeah, it’s police—it’s police abuse. They’re abusing the people in there right now.
LIZ BALDWIN: They’re abusing!
MATT BALDWIN: They’re abusing their rights. They said, ,Oh, you’re subject to arrest. But he was subject to get your head smashed in? Are you subject to get killed? How far are they going to go?
LIZ BALDWIN: We know our rights. We know our rights.
MATT BALDWIN: How far are they going to take it?
AARON MATÉ: Are you a medic?
MATT BALDWIN: And everything I had was in my tent.
LIZ BALDWIN: We were going to stay, until they started beating people

As protesters chanted during the raid, New York, Cairo, Wisconsin! Push us down, we’ll rise again!

INITIAL POST: Nearly 800 of them have happened within the last four days. And, while most of the arrests have taken place in Manhattan in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, there have been many others elsewhere, for example, earlier today, 24 in Philadelphia, 25 in Los Angeles, 25 in Portland, 12 in Houston, 17 in Dallas, 21 in Las Vegas, 11 in Minneapolis.

Occupy Wall Street Day of Action

2011-11-17T14:15:00.059-05:00

UPDATE 7 (11:26 PM PST): Marchers in Greece in support of Occupy Wall Street:

Note the lines of police officers on the right side of the picture.

UPDATE 6 (4:27 PM PST): The NYPD estimates over 32,000 people in the process of entering the Brooklyn Bridge and crossing over it. Marchers extend from one end of the bridge to the other as they walk along the median passageway between traffic going in both directions. There is a Twitter feed here that appears to be most current, along with the one at the Adbusters site. You can follow the march on the Channel 1 and Channel 2 ustreams of The Other 99. Connectivity can be difficult at times.

UPDATE 5 (2:25 PM PST): Foley Square is packed with approximately ten thousand people, with feeder marches from Broadway and elsewhere still en route, along with others travelling by subway.

UPDATE 4 (1;34 PM PST): On his blog, Greg Mitchell of The Nation reports that there is a large march from Union Square to Foley Square, a situation that he describes as a Wild scene-- thousands marching on streets, police cannot control. On The Other 99 ustream, protesters march down Broadway, with a long line of police and motorcycle cops alongside in the street. 50 unmarked police vehicles crossing in front of the march. Over 27000 people watching the ustream. The Other 99 says that the police know all about us.

UPDATE 3 (1:18 PM PST): An example of what has transpired during the subway action:

On a train bound for Times Square roughly a dozen demonstrators shared stories with their fellow passengers. A young woman named Molly described her work in low-income communities where people lack access to healthy food options. She described the dearth of nutritious options in a country of extreme wealth as an outrage. Twenty five year-old John explained to the passengers how he had been forced to move back in with his parents because he couldn't find a job; a move he described as a disgrace.

Looks like there were no arrests in Liberty Square.

UPDATE 2 (12:23 PM PST): Tweets that mass arrests at Liberty Square are imminent.

UPDATE 1 (11:59 PM PST): Subway actions will be underway momentarily by Occupy Wall Street with a subsquent gathering at Foley Square at 5pm EST for a march to take back our bridges. The protests have not been called to shut down the subway system, but to flood the stations and engage in outreach to commuters. By the way, the Guardian has a good live blog as well.

INITIAL POST (11:39 AM PST): Today is the Occupy Wall Street Day of Action. Chaotic scenes across Manhattan, with over 200 people arrested during various actions, including an attempt this morning to prevent the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. For updates, go here. There is also a livestream here, and a ustream from The Other 99 here. Both The Other 99 ustream and the livestream have over 27000 viewers. For a Twitter feed, go here. Police have kettled and assaulted protesters at one protest site in Manhattan, Liberty Square with reports of multiple victims. In one instance, cops chased down a man who was kicking the barricades and beat him bloody prior to arrest. Not surprisingly, reporters have been prohibited from covering the assault. A large crowd in the park remains with a heavy riot police presence. Clearly, the police have a strategy of trying to instigate a violent response from the crowds. In a most impressive display of restraint and deliberation, the people in the park are conducting an impromptu assembly to decide their next course of action. Apparently, Liberty Square has now been reopened.

Occupation at Bank of America Building in San Francisco (5:07 PM PST)

2011-11-16T19:59:00.009-05:00

55 people have been arrested during an occupation which is ongoing at the Bank of America building in San Francisco. Most of the participants are from UC Santa Cruz, with others from the occupations in Oakland and San Francisco. ABC 7 in San Francisco has live video of the police arresting protesters inside the bank on the first floor, which is also a high rise office building. For a ustream of the rally outside in their support, go here.

New York's Finest (Part 2)

2011-11-16T12:41:00.001-05:00

Tents Going Up in Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley (8:39 PM PST)

2011-11-15T23:38:00.004-05:00

Apparently, Robert Reich is also about to speak to the crowd.

Simultaneous General Assemblies in NYC and Berkeley (5:33PM PST)

2011-11-15T20:31:00.003-05:00

Ustreams of simultaneous general assemblies at Zuccotti Park in New York City and Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.

UC Strike/Occupy Wall Street Raided

2011-11-15T11:31:00.022-05:00

UPDATE 7 (3:28 PM PST): #3OccupySF ustream of Occupy Oakland march to UC Berkeley in support of the systemwide strike call.The march is proceeding down Telegraph Avenue, about half a mile away from UC Berkeley. #occupyberkeley has a ustream from downtown Berkeley as well. Follow the Twitter feeds at Occupy Oakland and Occupy Berkeley for replacement ustreams as necessary throughout the rest of the day, as those currently providing video may lose battery power for transmission. Meanwhile, at UC Davis, 400 students are involved in a sit-in at the Mrak Hall administration building in response to the it:

UPDATE 6 (3:18 PM PST): The Other 99, live ustream from Zuccotti Park.

UPDATE 5 (1:59 PM PST): The trial court rules against Occupy Wall Street and refuses to permit people to camp in Zuccotti Park. A cautionary tale about relying upon the courts for redress.

UPDATE 4 (1:22 PM PST): Denver, Portland, Oakland, Eureka, New York City, and, according to the Adbusters Occupy Wall Street Twitter feed, police preparing for raids in Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne . . . the crackdown on Occupy Wall Street is global. Impossible to keep up with developments as tweets are overwhelming the page, and the Occupy Oakland march hasn't even started yet. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has openly violated a court order permitting the return of the protesters to the park all day. At least 7 reportes have been arrested by the NYPD.

UPDATE 3 (1:16 PM PST): We want our park now! Protesters encircle Zuccotti Park as they await a trial court ruling as to whether they can reenter:

Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters have returned to the financial district plaza they've used as a base of operations for the last two months. Citing a court order issued this morning establishing their right to enter Zuccotti Park – which they describe as Liberty Square – the demonstrators marched on the plaza late this morning.
As they approached the square, police officers directed the marchers into a chute of barricades that led to a dead-end. With the pen full, protesters demanded the police let them free. Individuals steadily began to create spaces between barricades and within a short amount of time took the sidewalk surrounding the perimeter of the plaza.
We want our park now! the protesters chanted, as the police directed them to keep moving along the sidewalk. Many carried this morning's court order in their hands and often challenged police officers to respond to it. Protesters repeatedly told the NYPD they were breaking the law by barring them from the park.

There may not be a court ruling until 5pm EST.

UPDATE 2 (1:05 PM PST): Today, November 15, is also the day of the systemwide UC general strike, called last Thursday after police attacked protesters with batons at UC Berkeley. At my alma mater, UC Davis, there is a growing crowd of 2000 people on the Quad. At 2:30pm, there will be an Occupy Oakland march in support of the strike at UC Berkeley:

UPDATE 1 (10:30 PM PST) : Protesters and journalists arrested after gaining access to ground owned by Trinity Wall Street Church at Duarte Square.

INITIAL POST (8:45 PM PST): Livestream of police in riot gear in Zuccotti Park, with protesters marching outside along the street. The situation is predictably tense. Go here to watch it. The New York Police Department did not permit the media to cover the eviction. At least 70 people were arrested. Despite a court order allowing people back into the park, police are now refusing to permit entry. For the Twitter feed, go to the Adbusters Occupy Wall Street here site. For background and updates, you can also go to the other Occupy Wall Street website. Police are surrounding all entrances and refusing to communicate with anyone. There is a Guardian live blog where one can also monitor the situation as well. Over 7000 people are watching the global revolution livestream.

Ustreams of Occupy Oakland General Assembly at Frank Ogawa Plaza (6:26 PM)

2011-11-14T20:27:00.022-05:00

UPDATE (6:23 PM): Participants in Occupy Oakland plan to meet tomorrow at 2:30 PM at 14th and Broadway to march to UC Berkeley in support the UC strike tomorrow. According to OccupyMills, there will be another attempt to establish an occupation on campus. Meanwhile, the UC Regents cancelled their planned Wednesday meeting in San Francisco. Occupy Oakland reporting that 2000 people are participating in the general assembly.

INITIAL POST (5:28 PM): Live ustreams by OccupyMills and BellaEiko of the attempt by Occupy Oakland to recover Frank Ogawa Plaza. Approximately 700 people on the march. The mood is festive. People being allowed to gather in the park and the amphitheater, possibly consistent with an earlier Oakland Police Department announcement that people would only be confronted if they sought to set up tents again. A general assembly is now getting underway in the amphitheater with four police helicopters overhead shining lights on the crowd. Motorcycle cops are circling the plaza and there are about 40 cops, some in riot gear, at the back of the park. The amphitheater appears to be full, and there is a discussion about developing a plan for an upcoming action. Apparently, there will be a mass action on Saturday, November 19th, with a Sutter Health facility in Oakland as one of the targets. The San Francisco Chronicle is now reporting that there were 1000 people on the march, but, consistent with the policy of this blog, no link will be provided. For more information, you can also follow the Twitter feed at Occupy Oakland. I frankly didn't anticipate so many people will respond to the call. I guess I shouldn't underestimate those involved with Occupy Oakland.

Occupy Oakland Raided

2011-11-14T13:20:00.008-05:00

Police cleared out the encampment at Frank Ogawa Square this morning, and, according to the Occupy Oakland Twitter feed, arrested 32 people. The morning sweep purportedly cost $300,000 to $500,000. Meanwhile, on the north coast, the Eureka police department arrested 31 people while closing Occupy Eureka. A conservative estimate of Occupy Together arrests within the US prior to the ones in Oakland and Eureka is 3,024, with a surge over the last week. Consistent with past practice, Occupy Oakland has called for people to gather at the Oakland Main Library at 14th and Madison for a 4pm rally and march.

Interestingly, an ancillary group, associated with another encampment at Snow Park by Lake Merritt, has called a meeting for tomorrow night, with the intention of organizing itself as OccupyOaklandPeacefully. After the shooting death on Thursday near the plaza, a number of campers left and joined others already occupying the Lake Merritt site about half a mile away. This shouldn't be surprising, seeing someone killed, as Davey D. observed, must be a pretty traumatic experience. So far, there is no indication that it has been raided.

Such seemingly individual decisions highlight a fundamental conundrum for Occupy Together across the country. As occupations have expanded, they have been transformed into social service providers, providers of food, shelter, clothing and even emergency medical assistance. In Oakland, this was true from the inception, while it has emerged over time at Occupy Wall Street. Of course, this is consistent with the prefigurative aspect of the movement, but there is an unavoidable tension between such an enterprise and violent confrontations with the police. Furthermore, it places a tremendous burden upon participants in terms of creating a safe and secure environment for all involved. A serious example has been the controversy surrounding sexual assaults at occupations and whether they should be reported to the police.

If people do not feel safe, they will not participate in the occupations. Precariousness is a part of everyday life for poor people and women, regardless of class, and, it will, as Shake Anderson said on my radio show on Friday, enter the occupations along with those who have been subjected to it. Hence, the occupations have faced the challenge of recognizing violent expressions of it and addressing them as effectively as possible. In some instances, it may necessitate turning people over to the criminal justice system, as distateful as this is for many involved in the movement.

Externally, the debate about non-violence versus a diversity of tactics is central. There has been much criticism of the Black Bloc and others who have engaged in property destruction and violent encounters with the police. While one can engage this subject ideologically, as many have, others have identified the practical, day to day dimension of it. Homeless people, poor people, undocumented people . . for that matter, most people generally, are afraid of the police. Last Monday, a woman appeared before the Occupy Oakland general assembly to request an endorsement of a march of poor, undocumented and indigenous people objecting to the evisceration of social services in their communities. Someone asked if there would be any violence, and she responded something like oh no, not at all . . . there will be undocumented people and people with families on the march and the last thing they need is to be arrested.

Occupy Together is a social movement that has excited some of the most vulnerable and exploited people in our society. They, along with many others, are implicitly challenging many of the capitalist values of our society. Despite their fear of the police, they are already putting themselves in harm's way when they participate in occupations. They know that they may be arrested, beaten and lose what little personal property they have, and yet they have joined the occupations. Others should not involuntarily push them into violent situations for which they are unprepared.

Denver Raided, Imminent Raid in Portland, Rumored AM Raid in Oakland

2011-11-12T14:35:00.034-05:00

UPDATE 7 (November 13, 11:40 AM): Portland police dismantle Occupy Portland encampments at Chapman and Lownsdale Squares after a late night crowd in support of them goes home. In Oakland, some participants in Occupy Oakland forced their way back into Frank Ogawa Square and recovered it after being evicted and subjected to a police riot a couple of weeks ago. One wonders whether those involved in Occupy Portland will display the same resolve as it has been much less confrontational.

UPDATE 6 (November 13, 12:45 AM) : Police can't get through the crowd to reach the Occupy Portland encampment. Main Street is closed for three blocks out from it. Upon receiving the official announcement of the planned eviction, Occupy Portland treated it as a New Year's Eve invitation and invited everyone downtown. Interestingly, KGW News Channel 8 in Portland has placed the Occupy Portland livestream on its webpage. Bay Area news editors, especially ones that work for the San Francisco Chronicle, would rather eat rat poison than do something like that with Occupy Oakland. KGW also has its own livestream, where a police lieutenant, Robert King, is saying that the Portland Police Department anticipated a large crowd. Right. That's why the eviction notice was issued for midnight. Crowd continues to grow, while King says that the police plan to wait until the crowd dissipates. King and KGW keep emphasizing the good relationship with Occupy Portland. So why evict the encampment? Yes, the business community demanded it, just like in Oakland.

UPDATE 5 (11:56 PM): Occupy Portland eviction scheduled for four minutes away at midnight. An estimated 5000 to 6000 people awaiting police action. There is a livestream here, as well as a Facebook page and a Twitter feed on the Occupy Portland webpage:

The bike brigade has just arrived. Occupy Portland! #opdx

Mobile candlelight vigil encircling Occupy Portland. #opdx

Group on corner of Main & 4th have barricaded itself, chanting "We are non-violent. We are not leaving." #opdx

Mounted officers & riot cops on the ground, helicopters overhead, laughing overheard. #opdx

In this movement, it seems that the action doesn't get started until after 10:00pm. 6100 people watching the livestream.

UPDATE 4 (9:19 PM): Occupy Denver encampments dispersed by the police with 16 arrests confirmed and an undetermined number of additional ones. At one point, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of occupiers. Police followed protesters down side streets as they attempted to regroup. Rumors rampant that Occupy Oakland will be raided tonight, with video activists en route to the encampment to record it. The Oakland Police Department has warned journalists of potential risk to personal safety if they cover the assault.

UPDATE 3 (2:41 PM): Derrick Jensen speaking now on ustream at Occupy Oakland. He is exhorting the police to refuse to attack the encampment and join it instead. He is also, to his credit, confronting the failure of some occupations to report rapes to the police. He asserts that people involved in occupations should force the police to do their jobs by turning accused rapists over to them. He demands that the participants in Occupy Oakland express a zero tolerance towards rape, which the men in the crowd do. He says that a cop friend told him that cops protect us from sociopaths. He turns towards cops nearby and rhetorically asks why cops attack unionists and indigenous people instead of sociopathic capitalists He says, If they won't protect us, cops should have the common decency to get out of the way.

UPDATE 2 (2:18 PM): Police are massing and putting on riot gear in preparation for a raid at Occupy Denver. For updates, there is a livestream here, as well as the Occupy Denver Facebook page. Meanwhile, there is another one anticipated tonight at Occupy Portland. The Occupy Portland Facebook page is probably the best source of up to the minute information.

UPDATE 1 (2:07 PM): OakFoSho has a ustream from Occupy Oakland. A pleasant, sunny day. Veterans have apparently occupied a building in the area, and the police have informed them that it may be raided within a few hours.

INITIAL POST: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Oakland officials have approved another police assault upon Occupy Oakland, most likely in advance of the contentious UC Regents meeting in San Francisco next Wednesday, which will require a substantial, region wide police presence. Given that the Chronicle has been in the forefront of the hysteria to shut down Occupy Oakland, I am not providing a link to the article. For those of you interested in staying abreast of current developments, go to the Occupy Oakland website and follow the Twitter feed on the right side of the page. There is also a livestream here, and OakFoSho transmits live video from the encampment as well. They are likely to be your best sources of information in the event of another forcible eviction from Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Shooting Death Near Occupy Oakland

2011-11-10T23:15:00.025-05:00

UPDATE 5: (11:22 PM): An ABC 7 camera crew was attacked when it tried to take video of the critically wounded victim shortly after the shooting. Why did this happen? Perhaps, this may provide an insight:

The death of Hugh O'Connor occurred on September 20, 1967. O'Connor, a Canadian television journalist, was filming a coal miner at his rented house in Jeremiah, Letcher County, Kentucky when Hobart Ison, the property owner, arrived, told O'Connor and his crew to leave, then shot and killed O'Connor. Journalists and filmmakers had descended upon Appalachia in the late 1960s to document the living conditions there, in relation to the War on Poverty. This offended many local residents, who objected to the stereotyping and criticism by outsiders, as well as their tendency to show only the poor of Appalachia.

People can feel such resentments intensely:

Although many were shocked by the crime, local residents rallied to Ison's defense. About 100 residents attended his bond hearing to support and offer assistance in paying the bond. According to a 2001 book:
Locals defended Ison not because they approved of murder and not because of an innate, clannish suspiciousness of outsiders, but because they perceived the prying eyes of reporters to be an assault on manners, common decency, and the integrity of their communities.

Interestingly, the first trial of Ison resulted in an 11 to 1 hung jury, and, after subsequently entering a guilty plea for voluntary manslaughter, he was paroled after only serving one year in prison.

While the crowd should not have attacked the crew, and injured the reporter/cameraman, Randy Davis, the people in the crowd, in the heat of the moment, could have construed the crew as violent crime paparazzi.

UPDATE 4 (10:57 PM): Compelling series of tweets from Davey D.:

mrdaveyd Davey D
Lastly we have to come to grips that not all the violence we experience will come from cops.. Sadly sometimes it's 99% on 99% #occupyoakland
58 seconds ago

mrdaveyd Davey D
We need to comfort the young man's family.. We need to comfort those who saw this.. We need to comfort each other.. #occupyoakland
2 minutes ago

mrdaveyd Davey D
Now more than ever #occupyoakland must be revolutionary and the most revolutionary thing u can do is love, uplift, comfort & help heal!

mrdaveyd Davey D
Seeing a violent death is tragic-For some in Oakland it's all too familiar for others its traumatizing- I'm sure the family is devastated
16 seconds ago

mrdaveyd Davey D
#occupyoakland like any other community has to take bold, loving steps to heal.. I mean Really heal.. Lots of folks saw this man get killed
2 minutes ago

mrdaveyd Davey D
#occupyoakland like many other communities in Oakland & urban spaces around the country has to grapple w/ loss of life to violence
3 minutes ago

mrdaveyd Davey D
This young man was part of the 99%.. He was one of many who have lost their lives to violence..it hurts to say that.. Its painful
4 minutes ago

mrdaveyd Davey D
While one's initial reaction is to pt out the young mN who was shot was not part of the encampment, we can't separate him from our community

Quite a contrast to the cynical opportunism on display from Mayor Jean Quan and City Council member Ignacio De La Fuente, who can't resist exploiting Alex's death to achieve their political objective of ending the encampment.

UPDATE 3 (10:46 PM): OakFoSho has a livestream of the vigil for the victim, Alex, at Occupy Oakland.

UPDATE 2 (10:44 PM): According to Eyeslam: A shooting is a reason to call for the end of violence, to end the flood of guns in the streets; not for the end of #OccupyOakland.

UPDATE 1 (10:40 PM): Shockingly, there was a murder at the same location in April.

INITIAL POST: Tragic killing of a young black male near Occupy Oakland in front of Tully's Coffee at 14th and Broadway. Occupy Oakland medics were first responders. Others formed a circle around the victim to allow him to receive medical care and tried to apprehend the suspects. A media crew that attempted to gather video of the victim at the scene was attacked by angry people. So far, the Oakland Police Department states that neither the suspect nor the victim appear to have been associated with the encampment. Not surprisingly, that isn't preventing Mayor Jean Quan from saying that the encampment will be closed tonight, although she is also requesting that people leave voluntarily. Meanwhile, the mood in the plaza is understandably somber, and the people there are now holding a vigil. For updates, follow the Twitter feed at Occupy Oakland, which is a good source of information from numerous sources.

Oakland Chamber of Commerce Demands Another Police Assault on Occupy Oakland

2011-11-10T17:25:00.011-05:00

UPDATE: This is why there is such urgency towards suppressing manifestations of Occupy Together like Occupy Oakland. Fred Shavies, the officer interviewed in this video, was, amazingly, one of the undercover Oakland Police Department officers exposed about a couple of weeks ago:

INITIAL POST: A press conference today by Oakland Chamber of Commerce President Joe Haraburda concluded about two hours ago:

susie_c Susie Cagle
"What if #OccupyOakland continues?" pres: "it better not... It better not."
17 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland "we believe the police acted appropriately..." pres just said Scott Olsen might've actually been injured by a baseball bat??
18 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland saying now the raid was "handled very professionally."
19 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland "our concentration at this point in time is ending the encampment." rising frustration in presidents voice.
20 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland "fights, fire hazards." "it's an illegal occupation -- that's OUR property." "end the occupation NOW."
21 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland now chamber pres complaining about Quan more. They met last week but "the mayor wasn't really listening."
22 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
Chamber survey results: 76% agree with #ows goals but 49% disapprove of #OccupyOakland and only 33% agree w camping in plaza
23 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland tenants pulling out of leases. "we haven't heard anything that seems like Quan is moving forcefully in any direction"
27 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland Chamber of commerce releasing stats on local biz. 30-40% biz down @ restaurants. "the camp must go" "downward spiral"
29 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
New perspective -- overhearing other press here making fun of #OccupyOakland
32 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
@ @beingtherewith yep
34 minutes ago »
susie_c Susie Cagle
#occupyoakland At chamber of commerce press conference. Nearly didn't get in because I look too radical?
39 minutes ago »

Influential people within the Oakland political and economic establishment are not hiding their intentions. I don't recall a situation in recent years where publicly prominent people within a community like some members of the Oakland City Council yesterday and the Oakland Chamber of Commerce today have openly advocated the use of force against people that almost guarantees more incidents of police brutality, if not a violent eruption in downtown Oakland. Amazingly, even the Oakland Police Officer's Association recognizes it. It is a high risk approach, given that only 49% of chamber members surveyed disapprove of the encampment, with a surprisingly high number of 33% in support of it.

Of course, it is doubtful that the such an assault will help the businesses of downtown Oakland. Instead, it is likely to indelibly stain the area as the site of some of most intense police violence inflicted upon the populace in recent American history. It will be remembered as emblematic of the paramilitarization of the police in this country. Accordingly, it would accelerate a gentrification process that has taken place in fits and starts over the last 20 years, except that there is no capital to finance such a transformation, at least not now, so it will have the immediate effect to turning the area into even more of a social and economic desert, potentially, ironically enough, creating more opportunitites for alternative social organization like Occupy Oakland.

Haraburda is revealing when he emphasizes the loss of business for restaurants. His emphasis is probably duplicitous, as discretionary spending has declined precipitously since the late summer, so Occupy Oakland may be a convenient scapegoat. For example, the notion that someone is not going to go to an Oakland Chinatown restaurant 6 or 7 blocks to the south of the encampment is ludicrous. Consistent with this, many of these restaurants are a feature of upper middle class entertainment that characterizes American cities. Hence, the truly frightening aspect of Occupy Oakland is that it points towards a prefigurative alternative of urban life.

Mass Occupy Action at UC Berkeley

2011-11-09T23:01:00.041-05:00

UPDATE 6 (November 10, 12:34 PM): Ongoing discussions in Sproul Plaza in advance of a general assembly scheduled for 6pm.

UPDATE 5: Photo of general assembly at UC Berkeley:

UPDATE 4 (November 10, 1:10 AM): There are about 1500 people left in the plaza. About half of them participated in the vote on the strike proposal. It passed the 90% threshold with 95% support.

UPDATE 3 (November 10, 12:36 AM): UC police say that 200 more officers have arrived, but no one has seen them. Meanwhile, assembly discussion has concluded in regard to a proposal for a systemwide UC strike on Tuesday, November 15th. People are breaking out into small groups of 20 to vote on it. It is, of course, expected to be approved overwhelmingly.

UPDATE 2 (November 10, 12:15 AM): Proposals now being submitted for a possible systemwide UC action, with attendant calls for solidarity. Crowd remarkably focused given the large number of people involved in this impromptu assembly.

UPDATE 1: In regard to my post earlier this evening about the proposal concerning the Black Bloc at the Occupy Oakland general assembly, which apparently allowed for a diversity of tactics, meaning property destruction outside of mass actions, there has been a report that it failed miserably, garnering just over 15% of the vote in a modified consensus process that requires 90% approval. For a more detailed presentation about what transpired during the discussion of this subject, as well as others addressed during the assembly, go here.

INITIAL POST (November 9, 10:54 PM):

OakFoSho's livestream is here. You can also follow at Occupy Oakland as well. OakFoSho reports 2000 to 3000 people, with more arriving from Occupy Oakland on BART. Others from Occupy Oakland, as well as people from Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Berkeley, are already there in a show of support. Apparently, the crowd in Sproul Plaza grew much larger after the second police attack upon the occupiers in the early evening. 39 people were arrested as a result of efforts to occupy the plaza earlier in the day. Right now, some Oakland Police Department and Alameda County Sheriff's Department officers are at the scene in addition to the UC police, but there are only 50 to 70 cops total. Meanwhile, occupy participants are forming groups of marshals in an attempt to prevent violence. There were rumors that Occupy Oakland was going to be raided, but that fear has ebbed. An estimated 30,000 people are watching the livestream all over the world.

Livestream Occupy Oakland General Assembly

2011-11-09T20:20:00.010-05:00

UPDATE: The proposal concerning the Black Bloc, which apparently provided for a diversity of tactics, meaning property destruction outside of mass actions, was defeated as it only garnered 15% of the vote in a modified consensus process that requires 90%. For a more detailed presentation of what transpired during a discussion of this subject, as well as others addressed during the assembly, go here.

INITIAL POST: Large crowd of 700-800 people in attendance tonight under threat of police assault as previously directed toward occupiers at Occupy Cal earlier today. Black Bloc proposal under discussion now at 8:15 PM. The proposal states that people employing Black Bloc tactics should desist from engaging in property destruction and violence during mass actions as they did during the November 2nd general strike, but recognizes their possible utility of such activity in other situations. It also emphasizes that the street violence during the late evening hours of November 2nd and the early morning hours of November 3rd damaged local businesses that support Occupy Oakland. It looks like it is going to be an emotional discussion, but the participants seem good natured.

Sacramento Police Arrest 73 Year Old Man for Sitting in the Park Past Curfew

2011-11-08T10:44:00.005-05:00

For more information about the arrest of Carlos, go here. It was probably around 40 degrees outside at the time. Of course, if you hadn't guessed, he was arrested for sitting in Cesar Chavez Park, the park occupied by Occupy Sacramento during the day.

Don't Film the Oakland Police Department

2011-11-07T11:21:00.007-05:00

UPDATE 4: Arrests in Riverside, California, noteworthy for the anger of the crowd:

UPDATE 3: Occupy Atlanta takes action to try to stop a home foreclosure in nearby Snellville:

Occupy Atlanta has spent a month in downtown Atlanta, decrying corporate influence in U.S. politics and clashing with local authorities over their right to protest at a local park. Now the protesters are turning their attention to the suburbs, hoping to use a family of five in south Gwinnett to highlight the nation's foreclosure crisis.
This family is the perfect example of the fraud going on in the mortgage and banking industries, said Latron Price, one of Occupy Atlanta's organizers. We plan to shed light on the foreclosure issue and we look to make a stand here.
Nearly two dozen protesters assembled Monday afternoon at Tawanna Rorey's four-bedroom home in a neighborhood just south of Snellville, clogging the narrow, winding street that runs in front of the house with cars, vans and TV trucks. Many neighbors stopped to gawk at the spectacle and even honked their car horns in support of the crowd.
Occupy Atlanta shifted their focus to Gwinnett about 12 hours after five people were arrested near Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta, a site that was the staging area for Wall Street protests similar to ones held in other U.S. cities.
Most members of the group showed up at the Rorey's home after the family's attorney told them the Gwinnett Sheriff's Department was prepared to evict them Monday afternoon.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. Michael Moore described a similar episode in Capitalism: A Love Story. But the fact that this is happening within the context of Occupy Together is significant.

UPDATE 2: I don't quote Chris Hedges much, because I figure that you find out what he says independent of me. He also has an excessively moralistic streak that I sometimes find sanctimonious, as if he is preaching from the mount. But this is important enough for me to post:

We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal judgment. Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of ruling principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit. The corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms, our newsrooms, our entertainment systems and our consciousness. This corporate culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us into compliant consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice. These corporate machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in company rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a childish optimism and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate rituals, bolstered by retreats and training seminars, by grueling days that sometimes end with initiates curled up under their desks to sleep, ensure that only the most morally supine remain. The strong and independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning advance upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt writes, the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.
Our political class, and its courtiers on the airwaves, insists that if we refuse to comply, if we step outside of the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we will make things worse. This game of accepting the lesser evil enables the steady erosion of justice and corporate plundering. It enables corporations to harvest the nation and finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into neofeudalism, one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly any action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime. It goes on until corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the planet were not worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth. It goes on until moral acts, such as calling for those inside the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs to be tried, see you jailed, and the crimes of financial fraud and perjury are upheld as lawful and rewarded by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress. And all this is done so a handful of rapacious, immoral plutocrats like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who sucks down about $250,000 a day and who lied to the U.S. Congress as well as his investors and the public, can use their dirty money to retreat into their own Forbidden City or Versailles while their underlings, basking in the arrogance of power, snap amusing photos of the rabble outside their gates being hauled away by the police and company goons.

Hedges, in case you haven't heard, was arrested on Saturday during an OWS protest in front of Goldman Sachs.

UPDATE 1: But the police can film you:

On Nov 2nd over 100 people took to the streets of Asheville, NC in a fun, spirited and family friendly march to show support for Occupy Oakland and their general strike. People of all ages from toddlers to grandparents participated in the march carrying banners reading, We are all Scott Olsen and Asheville is Oakland, Oakland is Asheville. The march was the largest protest to take the streets in Asheville without a permit since the Iraq War started in 2003. By all accounts it was a well received and empowering event for those that participated in it. Unless that is you are the Asheville Police Department.
Though the APD did little to stop the march, they did bring out dozens of officers, including the forensics team and undercover officers to video and photograph Asheville residents expressing their First Amendment rights. The APD has done this sort of unconstitutional surveillance for years at all types of protests. However this time is different. Starting Saturday Nov 5 the APD began grabbing Occupy Asheville participants off the streets that they claim they identified from police footage of the march. So far 7 have been arrested, and the police say there are many more arrests on the way. They are being charged with resisting public officers, impeding traffic, unlawful assembly. One person has an additional charge of wearing a mask in public.

For those of you who are unaware, Asheville is a historic resort city near the Great Smoky Mountains. Thomas Wolfe grew up there just after the turn of the last century, and wrote autobiographical novels, such as Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, about about his experiences. At that time, Asheville was a destination for wealthy people seeking the purportively curative effects of the mineral baths. Today, it is a place where it is difficult to sell your house in the aftermath of the bursting of the housing bubble, which has been particularly brutal in places like Asheville which relied upon second home and retiree sales.

INITIAL POST:

A Misguided Action at Occupy Oakland? (Part 2)

2011-11-04T13:02:00.014-04:00

UPDATE 2: Rumors of a imminent shutdown of Occupy Wall Street, too.

UPDATE 1: A an open letter by a medic on indybay:

My concern was with the ill-conceived tactics used to occupy the building, in that it looked like an anarchist glamorshot instead of a committed and revolutionary act to actually acquire and hold that space. I am tired of direct actions being done in a way that turns them into photo-ops and nothing else. I am tired of watching barricades be built only to be abandoned the minute the cops open fire. In addition, the crowd on 16th around the occupied building was terrifying far before the cops ever showed up. As a woman and queer person I wanted to get the fuck out of there almost immediately as it felt wildly unsafe on multiple levels, and I feel like whoever orchestrated the take-over made choices that specifically facilitated the overall crazy atmosphere. There were fistfights, screaming matches, fires, and just a general vibe that people were out to fuck shit up, and absolutely no attempt on the part of anyone to shut that sort of in-group violence down.
The setting on fire of the barricades was totally unnecessary, and may make it necessary for the city to call for the camp to be cleared; the breaking of windows and vandalizing of businesses which supported the strike was utterly stupid and counterproductive; and watching black bloc-ers run from the cops and not protect the camp their actions had endangered, an action which ultimately left behind many mentally ill people, sick people, street kids, and homeless folks to defend themselves against the police onslaught was disturbing and disgusting in ways I can't even articulate because I am still so angry at the empty bravado and cowardice that I saw.

By the way, the possibility that the city of Oakland will shut down the occupation is very real.

INITIAL POST: A comment by Tatiana Makovkin on indybay (and, note, there are now 85 responses to this post linked here yesterday, almost all well worth your time):

Taking this building was a good idea, but the action was not planned or executed correctly. The public has no idea about the backstory of the building or the intentions behind Occupying the building.
If your goal is to occupy a building, why would you do it in the public spotlight? If people really wanted to put the building to use, they would quietly, secretly, break into the building, and fill it with people. They could have actually begun USING the building. Then, they could gain public support before an eviction attempt by educating the public about the history of the building and the good use to which an empty building had been turned.
Instead they made a public statement. That means that this was not a practical action. It was not a real attempt to use the building, it was symbolic. And a symbolic action is designed to send a message. But what was the message?
There was a banner hung on the building that said Occupy Everything I watched the TV live news report and the anchorwoman spoke the words on the banner as part of the report. At the time I thought it was cute. But now that I read the above description of what people were supposedly trying to accomplish, I see that the banner should have carried a specific message about this particular building and action, to educate people about the story that was unfolding.
As for the barricades, give me a break. I squatted in the Lower East Side in the early 90s. Evictions are not a game. The cops rolled a tank onto 13th street when they wanted the squatters out. A TANK.
Were these protestors actually intending to defend the building militarily? Did they think they had a chance? What is the point of barricades? What is the point of burning trash cans? Do you think that will make it possible for you to keep the building? Of course not. You know you can't win against their military might. We can only win against their limp morality, their shriveled integrity, and their flaccid principles. And we win by being morally strong, impeccable in our integrity and holding fast to wise and courageous principles of service and compassion. Service to the community. We win by expressing our morality, integrity and principles with clarity and grace.
The people who raged in the street last night were not motivated by an impulse to serve the community, that is clear. What did motivate them, really? Maybe they will do some introspection, look into themselves and ask of themselves what is true. Were they looking to have a good time? Craving excitement and adrenaline? Infatuated with their own egos and sense of identity? Were they swept up in the euphoric feeling that comes with being part of something, part of a group, a club?
This movement is not about being in a club. This is the 99%. This is for everyone. We show our faces. And when I say this movement is for everyone, I want to feel that this movement is for you too.
The people who were part of the drama that played out late last night need to look into their hearts. They need to ask themselves who they serve. If they are seeking to serve their own selfish needs, they don't hold a place of honor in this movement. They are the troublesome relation and we are all wondering how they will reconcile with the rest of the family. Maturity is expressed in a willingness to take responsibility. They should apologize. Publicly. They should work to mend the damage that they have caused to the spirit and reputation of this movement, a movement awash in beauty and humility. The people in this movement are so humble, none of them will claim to have the authority to lead or to speak for the other members. We represent ourselves, and we are all in leadership positions. Decentralized structure means that we are all responsible. You be responsible too, anarchists. Be responsible on a spiritual level. Be responsible on an emotional level to the good, trusting people in this movement whom you have hurt. Be responsible on an intellectual level by thinking carefully about your goals and strategy and acting for the good of the whole
Taking this building and starting a library and center of operations would have been an action that served the good of the whole. But that is not what you did. You didn't take a building. You just took a lot of attention and made the conversation center around yourselves. The people in the movement deserve better. The 99% deserve better. They deserve an apology.

Personally, I'm not that big into apologies. While sometimes warranted, a request for one often makes the recipient defensive, without signaling a change in perspective if they fulfill the request. And, that is what is so urgent here, a recognition by those involved in the Traveler's Aid Society seizure that it is essential to consider the implications of their actions within a broader social movement, and conduct themselves accordingly.

A Misguided Action at Occupy Oakland? (Part 1)

2011-11-03T14:55:00.017-04:00

UPDATE: Go here for a statement from some of the participants in the Traveler's Aid Society squat referenced below and an insightful array of responses to it. Many of those posting comments expressed the opinion that the seizure of the building was poorly planned in light of the predictable police response and put the occupation at risk.

INITIAL POST: In most instances, a direct action for the purpose of squatting an abandoned building, one in which services for the homeless had been provided, would be a good idea with an understandable social objective, the exposure of how the perpetuation of private property impoverishes people. But late last night and early this morning was not such a time. The police responded with force, and the anarchists and others who squatted the building, fought back. Not surprisingly, the police beat pretty much all the arrestees. Local businesses found themselves in the crossfire, and even if one discounts the bias of the San Francisco Chronicle, there remains the question as to how well anarchists will swim in the downtown Oakland sea in the aftermath of this incident. One does have to consider these things, including the reaction of the Occupy Oakland general assembly, when engaging in such actions as part of a broader social movement.

What was wrong with the squat? Was it because it might take the relatively non-violent sheen off a day of Occupy Oakland marches and the shutdown of the Port of Oakland? Not necessarily. While there are certainly a number of progressives who are always discomforted by efforts to seize abandoned properties and defend them, public acceptance of more confrontational forms of protest is on the rise, as proven by Occupy Together itself. The movement has grown because of synergy between progressive and liberal involvement and proponents of direct action. Was it because the squat and resulting confrontation would be manipulated by the media against the movement? Again, not necessarily. If you haven't noticed, much of the media remains hostile to Occupy Together and has no difficulty manufacturing reasons to malign it. Indeed, the squat resulted in the paradoxical media embrace of the marches and port shutdown as non-violent in contradistinction to the squat. So one can rather oddly argue that the squat actually pushed the media to portray the other aspects of the general strike more favorably.

Of course, it is possible that the squat and subsequent conflict will frighten people away from future participation, but this is dependent upon subsequent events, and not at all certain. But it does appear that the decision to proceed with the squat drained the energy away from the shutdown of the Port of Oakland. Thousands of people stopped traffic and blocked the gates at the port during the early evening hours, and there were plans to stop the early morning shifts from entering the port as well. Given that the unionized workers must come to work unless prevented from doing so by a sizeable community picket, it was essential that a substantial number of people turn out to block the gates again. Accordingly, upon the return of the protesters to the encampment, there should have been an emphasis upon ensuring such a turn out. Instead, there was a diversion of people into the squat, while media reports of conflict between anarchists and police in downtown Oakland deterred anyone who had departed after participating in the protest from returning to the encampment to continue the blockade of the port.

So, an opportunity was missed as the port reopened after a small number of people were sent out by Occupy Oakland to block the gates. By 8:45am, the community picket, such as it was, ended. Just a fraction of the number of people who participated in the protest the previous evening would have been sufficient to prevent the opening of the port. Admittedly, that might not have happened in any event. There is something ritualistic about shutdowns of the Port of Oakland, and having obtained the gratification of having achieved their objective, many of those who protested might have failed to return regardless of what happened during the early morning hours in downtown Oakland. It is even possible that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had no interest in an extended shutdown, although there was a report, as noted here, that it wanted a 24 hour closure. If the union did come to such a decision because of the enormous, unanticipated size of the march to the port, then the violence that erupted as a consequence of the squat is all the more tragic. On the other side of the ledger, there is the fact that a sizeable number of people took to the streets to defend the squat, and that might be a harbinger of things to come.

Occupy Oakland Closes the Port of Oakland

2011-11-02T22:05:00.010-04:00

UPDATE 2: A late night squat of an abandoned building that had housed a provider of services to the homeless was apparently a bridge too far:

UPDATE 1: Bank closures were a prominent feature of protests during the day:

In addition to the port, where an average of $8.5 million in business is done each day, banks were a particular focus of Wednesday's action — and of its vandals. City officials said four branches were closed because of demonstrators.
David Solnit, a 47-year-old San Francisco resident, was among the protesters who strung yellow tape across the door of the downtown Wells Fargo branch and refused to budge. A few young people sat down in front of the door, and within an hour, 25 people had joined them, Solnit said.
Vandals smashed windows at the Bank of America branch near Lake Merritt and spray painted Class War, Shut It Down and 1946, the latter a historical reference to the general strike that shuttered Oakland for two days 65 years ago.

INITIAL POST:

A march of approximately 5,000 to 10,000 people, and perhaps, significantly more, reached the Port of Oakland and prevented trucks and the 7pm night shift from entering it, effectively closing it until the next shifts at 3am and 6am. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union wants to keep the port closed for 24 hours, undoubtedly for the reason for which the march and port closure were called, to support workers resisting a bitter lockout in Longview, Washington. Occupy Oakland is undertaking efforts to keep the gates closed during the early morning hours to stop the next shifts from entering the port.

Oakland General Strike Updates

2011-11-02T12:57:00.007-04:00

Indybay coverage has been excellent. For updates, go here (see the Twitter feed on the right side of the page) and here and here and here.

Oakland Rises by Standing as One

2011-11-01T13:23:00.010-04:00

I believe that people are going to shocked at the turnout for tomorrow's announced general strike in Oakland. Of course, most people will work, and most businesses will remain open. But the extent of public participation is going to be amazing. It is an intensification of a wave of direct action protest that has emerged in the East Bay in recent years.

First, there was rioting in downtown Oakland after it appeared that the Alameda County District Attorney was not going to prosecute BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the killing of Oscar Grant during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, 2009. Later that year, there was the student occupation at UC Berkeley in November 2009 in response to enormous fee increases, an occupation that avoided being attacked by the UC police because protesters came to their defense. UC student protests erupted across the state again in March 2010, with students and their supporters closing Interstate 580 in . . . where else? . . . Oakland. More recently, participants in No Justice! No BART!, an East Bay organization formed to demand the disbanding of the BART police after the killing of Grant, were involved in protests at San Francisco BART stations in August and September after the subsequent killing of Charles Hill at the Embarcadero station.

Occupy Oakland has built upon these previous efforts, presenting the most significant challenge to authority in the East Bay in decades. While those who advocate a pacifist form of non-violence found it objectionable, those who sought to recover Frank Ogawa Plaza for continued occupation reenergized the movement after an early morning police raid. After the city announced last Wednesday that the plaza was going to be fenced off indefinitely, a group challenged the officers surrounding it during a late afternoon protest and attempted to force their way through. Of course, we know what happened as a result, a police riot that raged on the streets for hours, a riot whereby the officers sought to bludgeon, tear gas and stun grenade Occupy Oakland out of existence.

But Mayor Jean Quan, Police Chief Howard Jordan and the officers called in from 17 jurisdictions failed. On the following day, people returned to occupy the plaza, this time without incident. The people who challenged the police the previous day had exhausted the appetite of the Oakland establishment for continued repression. And, now, the Oakland Police Officers Association has issued this open letter to the residents of Oakland:

We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.
As your police officers, we are confused.
On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.
Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.
To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the Stop Work strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.
That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against the establishment. But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?
It is all very confusing to us.

Support for the general strike tomorrow is growing. Afterwards, we will perceive opportunities for a radical transformation of society that have been heretofore unimaginable. t over at Pink Scare has reminded us of a quote by Lenin which concisely summarizes the situation: There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.

Police Infiltrate Occupy Oakland

2011-10-31T17:08:00.005-04:00

Another instance of the police engaging in the surveillance of the Occupy Together effort. Note that the 2003 comments of the current interim chief, Howard Jordan, at the start of the video most likely took place after the antiwar protests at the Port of Oakland that I mentioned on Saturday.

Hat tip to spocko at firedoglake.

The War at Home

2011-10-29T13:09:00.008-04:00

UPDATE 3: More on Denver:

After a peaceful and spirited march by an estimated 1,000 protesters, most in from the suburbs, the Denver Police apparently tried to take down a food distribution stand and were met with resistance by some OccupyDenver people. As Congressman Perlmutter, and eyewitnesses that I talked to later, tell it, the DPD used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and large batons to gas, spray and beat bystanders.
Congressman Perlmutter, who had been attending a Colorado Woman’s Summit meeting in Denver, featuring Congresswoman Diana DeGette, when he got word of the confrontation right down the street, rushed down to the Civic Center Park and attempted to mediate between police and protesters. Unsuccessful in de-escalating the violence, he told us of the protesters being tear gassed, pepper sprayed and beaten. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten involved. He looked down at his immaculate brown suit, shirt and tie. And I really wasn’t dressed for the occasion.

While on a much smaller scale, these are Chicago '68 kinds of experiences, where even prominent social and political figures discover that they are powerless in the face of the police onslaught. Many participants in the Occupy Together effort haven't had confrontational encounters with the police like people from poorer neighborhoods and communities of color, and they are now discovering that police officers aren't necessarily your friends. Are we living through a similar process of radicalization as a result?

UPDATE 2: There is now a guest post at naked capitalism (!) describing police brutality in Denver similar to what transpired in Oakland, replete with pictures of officers pointing non-lethal weapons at protesters and reporters, rubber bullet wounds inflicted upon protesters and a report that the police fired upon protesters seeking to assist the injured.

UPDATE 1: Oakland, Nashville, San Diego and, now, Denver. Contrary to what I said yesterday, it appears that the persistence of the protests and increasing grassroots liberal support has necessitated aggressive police action. All this, plus the fact that substantial numbers of people are participating in protests in cities not commonly known for dissidence. In Denver, the police provoked a confrontation by attacking protesters who ascended the capital steps without a permit.

INITIAL POST: Undoubtedly, you are aware of what transpired in Oakland earlier this week, especially late Wednesday afternoon, but, even so, you may be shocked by detailed reports such as this one:

Protesters were surrounded by police on 8th and Broadway, some of them being chased by police and dragged down to the ground and beaten. A protester was who was falling down was kicked by a police officer and pulled back to be beaten more and eventually zip tied and arrested. A group of protesters surrounded police and chanted, let them go! as police continued to beat protesters on the ground and jab those around with their billy clubs. The people who surrounded police attempted to grab the fallen protesters, but the force of the clubs was too much.
Screams filled the air, street signs rattled, horns and whistles blew and drums banged everywhere. The violent police officers that had beaten the fallen protesters were officially surrounded and fear could be seen in their eyes as hundreds yelled and screamed at them as there was no where for them to run or hide their faces.
After about ten minutes, police reinforcements ran on the scene, swinging at protesters with clubs and tackling some to the ground. Violence continued as protesters were scrambled throughout the intersection of 8th and Broadway. People were screaming and running everywhere in order to protect themselves from the forceful raid.

Please consider reading this report, posted on a promising new blog, The Resistance is Online, in its entirety. Beyond this, there is the atrocity perpetrated against Scott Olsen, seriously injured by a projectile fired by the police. An officer prevented people from coming to his assistance by firing a tear gas canister at close range at them. Even now, he cannot speak. Naturally, the mayor, Jean Quan, and the police chief, Howard Jordan, expressed remorse even though they were responsible for ordering the police assault. Amazingly, Jordan was shameless enough to visit Olsen in the hospital.

Events in Oakland are a cautionary story about the relationship between Occupy Together and the police around the country. Protesters have rightly sought to cultivate a positive relationship with law enforcement by emphasizing that the police are part of the 99%, as they have done in Sacramento, for example. By doing so, they have probably succeeded in preventing an earlier, more aggressive crackdown on the movement, as there has been public revulsion against highly publicized instances of police violence, as first occurred when a NYPD officer, Anthony Bologna, maced a group of penned protesters last month. Bologna actually reenergized a movement that was showing signs of exhaustion.

But have no doubt. If the police are ordered to clear out an encampment, they will do it. If they are ordered to do so aggressively, they will do so. If they are told to promptly resort to tear gas and flash grenades upon the emergence of any resistance, they will not hesitate. Similarly, if corporations, the federal government or wealthy campaign contributors complain loudly enough (in private, naturally), mayors will order the police into action. It doesn't matter if they are conservative, moderate or liberal, they will do as they are told, as Jean Quan did this week, and as Jerry Brown did in 2003, when he ordered the Oakland Police Department to suppress a protest against the invasion of Iraq at the Port of Oakland. Officers fired sting balls, concussion grenades and wooden dowels to clear the gates to the docks, inflicting numerous injuries.

For now, there has been no nationwide repression of the Occupy Together effort, probably because of fears that such an attempt would merely intensify it. Better to intimidate the participants through a calculated crackdown as occurred in Oakland. Interestingly, one can perceive the hidden hand of the Department of Homeland Security through the manner in which the earlier, pre-dawn arrests of those participating in the occupation was conducted. Streets all around the encampment were closed, BART service was delayed and AC Transit buses were re-routed around the area. Planning for the raid took a week, and Quan was fully informed and agreed with the decision to close the encampment. As with the peculiar police response to the BART protests in San Francisco during the summer, the Bay Area is apparently a training ground for the implementation of crowd control measures to suppress domestic unrest.

Occupy Sacramento Meltdown

2011-10-23T02:56:00.006-04:00

Watch live streaming video from occupysacto at livestream.com

Fatigue, the emergence of personal and political conflicts among the participants and a feminist fissure as a consequence of the men, it seems, deciding to prevent an alleged sexual assault in the area from being publicized during the assembly are the prominent features of this tumultuous session. Security comes across as a predominately male concern, while the women rightly criticize the failure of the group to recognize that the violence used to intimidate women is part and parcel of the violence of the American capitalist system directed against all of its victims, foreign and domestic.

In this, we encounter a rather odd instance of that old Marxist attitude that sexism is a secondary contradiction that awaits resolution upon the coming of the revolution. Social movements that marginalize women in this way invariably fail, and many of the catastrophic defeats of the 20th Century possess this feature. For now, though, the immediate peril is that Occupy Sacramento will find itself reduced to a kind of reality TV entertainment, a political version of Survivor. But Nagisa Oshima's films about the conflicts of avant-garde and leftist youth, particularly, Night and Fog in Japan, The Man Who Left His Will on Film, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, are probably a more apt parallel.

Memo to OWS: Please Start Talking About Bank of America

2011-10-21T17:00:00.003-04:00

Actually, as the excerpt from this article by masaccio indicates, the fraud predictably involves not just Bank of America, but all the usual suspects as well, such as J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and, drum roll please . . . Goldman Sachs:

The Bank of America (BAC) recently moved derivatives out of its Merrill Lynch subsidiary into a subsidiary plump with FDIC insured deposits. Bloomberg says the Fed wants to protect the bank holding company without increasing its own obligations. The FDIC opposes the transfer because it increases their risk.
Three of the five biggest derivatives players have already done this. The OCC Quarterly Report on Bank Derivatives Activities gives information about derivatives held by banks, and by bank holding companies, separately. AS of June 30, 2011, the numbers are nearly identical for JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Only Morgan Stanley and BAC had a significant part of their derivatives outside the warm embrace of the FDIC.
BAC apparently held $21.7 trillion in notional value outside of banking subsidiaries at June 30, and it has now moved that into FDIC insured institutions. The Bloomberg article doesn’t say exactly how much, and it isn’t reported in BAC’s earnings release for the third quarter. A reporter asked about this in the earnings call. Bruce Thompson, the Chief Financial Officer of BAC, said he was surprised by the article, and that the move was in the normal course of business.
The OCC Report gives some idea of the increase in risk. It uses a measure of risk called Total Credit Exposure, which is equal to the sum of Net Current Credit Exposure and Potential Future Exposure. The first is the net amount owed to the bank if all contracts were suddenly liquidated. The second is an attempt to estimate the potential future losses, using a formula developed by regulators. This number is compared to the Total Risk-Based Capital, which is the sum of Tier One Capital and Tier Two Capital. This calculation effectively excludes Tier Three Capital, the assets for which there is no liquid market and no clear method of calculating value.
According to the OCC Report dated 6/30/11, the ratio of Total Credit Exposure to Total Risk-Based Capital at BAC was 182%, meaning that regulators calculated the potential losses from derivatives at nearly double the total of the assets subject to valuation in liquid markets.

The global economy is stalling out again, possibly entering another recession as severe as 2008, and the largest US financial institutions have already carried out their escape plan so that can live to speculate another day.

Yves Smith of naked capitalism explains the brazenness of this action in relation to Bank of America:

The reason that commentators like Chris Whalen were relatively sanguine about Bank of America likely becoming insolvent as a result of eventual mortgage and other litigation losses is that it would be a holding company bankruptcy. The operating units, most importantly, the banks, would not be affected and could be spun out to a new entity or sold. Shareholders would be wiped out and holding company creditors (most important, bondholders) would take a hit by having their debt haircut and partly converted to equity.
This changes the picture completely. This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral.
But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough in deposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.

So, for any of you out there planning to attend a general assembly at OWS or any other Occupy Together location, please bring this matter to the attention of the participants if they are unaware of it.

The Economic Collapse of Greece

2011-10-20T13:31:00.003-04:00

For those of you who haven't followed the implementation of austerity in Greece since 2009, the Guardian reports that the EU and European Central Bank have determined that the Greek economy will contract by 15% between 2009 and 2012. Think about that for a moment. 15%. From July 2009 to August 2011, unemployment rose from just under 9% to 16.3%, with the IMF projecting 18.5% unemployment for 2012. Earlier in the year, in May, unemployment for people between the ages of 15 and 19 was 55%, and 37% for people between the ages of 20 and 24. One can therefore reasonably assume that unemployment among young people continues to increase and will continue to do so through 2012.

Accordingly, stories like this one are common:

I have worked since I was 16 and I have lived in Athens since I was 24. I remember that many times I had to struggle in order to survive with two jobs, but never have I stayed unemployed for too long. During the past eight years there were times when things were tight and difficult and other times when things were more or less ok. But not even in the most difficult period of my life, as a University student, did I find myself in the position I am today. For thirteen years I struggled, I fought, I stood on my feet. But now I can’t take it anymore. I’m giving up.
I’ve been unemployed for ten months. Knowing that I was going to lose my job, I started searching for a new one from as early as the Easter of 2010. By now I’ve send 155 CVs but I only got two replies back, both saying that they didn’t need employees. For the first time in my life I’m facing an eviction order by the end of this month. The landlord says that I have no dignity and that I live on her expense, forgetting the eight years that I have been meeting my obligations regularly or even the improvements I ‘ve made to her house on my own expenses. Still, she’s right. She’s no charity – she wants her money. The movers ask for 1200 euros to take my stuff back to my mother’s city or 150 per month in order to store them in a container. I cannot afford either of the two scenarios. I will probably have to throw away my household of ten years. The tax service is demanding 300 euro as an emergency levy with a 3% interest for every month I don’t pay. Another emergency tax is expected with the next electricity bill and that’s going to be 420 €. I have to pay 640€ every two months for social security, although the company I worked for explicitly told me that they have no job to offer and that even if they did, they would pay a monthly salary of no more than 420 euro. In short: the city in which I have lived for the past 13 years is spitting me off to the margins like if I’m some kind of trash. For the first time in my life, I have no place to stay and no one to hold on to. Any stock of patience and courage I had has now vanished.

And, then, there is this publicly known incident where a debtor set himself on fire in front of the Piraeus Bank in Thessaloniki. While this man was saved, reported suicides have doubled in Greece since the imposition of austerity:

A suicide help line at Klimaka, the charitable group, used to get four to 10 calls a day, but now there are days when we have up to 100, says a psychologist there, Aris Violatzis.
The caller often fits a certain profile: male, age 35 to 60 and financially ruined. He has also lost his core identity as a husband and provider, and he cannot be a man any more according to our cultural standards, Mr. Violatzis says.
Heraklion, commercial center of the island of Crete, has had a spate of such deaths.
Mr. Petrakis, the fruit and vegetable dealer, was just one of three recent suicides at a single wholesale food market on the edge of the city.
Victims once were typically adolescent males or old people facing severe illness, and in normal times suicide cases often involve a mixture of factors including mental illness, says local psychiatrist Eva Maria Tsapaki.
But the economic crash has created a new phenomenon of entrepreneurs with no prior history of mental illness who are found dead every other week, she says. It's very unusual.

With this context in mind, this sort of response starts to make sense:

The Greek government’s Minister of Interior affairs (Home Office) Harris Kastanidis was spotted in a cinema in Thessaloniki watching a movie. So a few hundred students stormed the cinema chanting slogans and threw him yoghurt. Several members of the audience joined the students booing Kastanidis and clapping when the yoghurt was thrown to him. Among other slogans one can hears: Let’s see who will jump first in the helicopter when this marvellous night like Argentina will come, In Greece, Turkey and Macedonia the enemy is in the ministries and in the banks, Terrorism is the waged slavery, no peace with the bosses.

If the United Kingdom, France and Germany, with the US conspiring in the background, try to hold the EU together with a new Greek junta, we can only hope that the workers of Europe come to the defense of the Greek people. Meanwhile, protests and riots in Athens have been ongoing throughout the day as the government secured approval of yet another round of austerity measures. For updates of what has been happening on the streets of Greece, go here and here and here and here.

Greece: Strikes, Clashes and Intensified Austerity

2011-10-19T14:44:00.014-04:00

UPDATE 2: Greek unions are saying that the strike today was the largest in the country's history with 500,000 people participating in it, with the media reporting 100,000. Significantly, a BBC reporter familiar with Athens said that he had never seen so many people on the streets. Meanwhile, others note that the Greek government is showing a shocking inability to control the crowds. Follow tweets on the Greek protests here. Is there a Pinochet to restore order, and impose discipline upon the working class so that the banks can be paid?

UPDATE 1: Updates from Occupied London over the course of the day (start from the bottom and read up):

17:52 PM Syntagma has been completely evacuated by the police. A huge, diverse crowd has attacked the Bank of Greece, trashing it inside. Large groups of demonstrators are trying to regroup in Syntagma. There is an urgent need for medical help at the square.
17:42 PM Cops try to scoop clear Syntagma, attacking from different sides. There is DELTA/DIAS at the Olympiou Dios columns, blocking off people from leaving
16:55 PM Generalised clashes all around Syntagma at the moment. The bulk of the demo has been pushed away form the sq.
16:45 PM A huge black block is attacked massively by police at the moment in front of the Ministry of Finance in Syntagma Sq.
16:22 PM Reltevely passive attitide of the police and reletevly calm situation now all around Syntagma. The masses of people remain there. banners of I do not Pay movement and base unions are in front of the police in the Unkown Soldier.
16.09 PM Step by step police units are occupying the Unkown Soldier Square in front of the Parliament, pushing people back towards Syntagma Square but they meet strong opposition and do not manage to move much forward, demonstrators respond with stones and head to head clashes any time a police unit tries to move forwrad. Thousands still there, just a couple of metres away from the police cordons and attack to them.
15:44 PM Clashes all around the centre of Athens. Tear gases, shock grenades mainly on Akadimias st. but burning barricades are all around the centre. In Syntagma several hundernd of demonstrators attacked with stones and sticks in co-ordinated way against the cops, police uses chemical gases en mase there, but people do not retreat and hold their posiitions in front of the parliament defending themselves, however a part of the Unkown soldier is occupied by the police now. Thick black smoke can be seen in front of the University Refectory.
15:19 PM Police operation along Akadimias st. head to head clashes with the police there. Clashes on the Uknown Soldier Square on the bottom of the staircase leading to the parliament building. Police operation takes place there as well, as they are trying to push the people towards Syntagma Square, stones and molotov cocktails against the police and clashes in front of the parliament carries on.
15:05 PM Base Union and Anarchist blocks are enetring now Syntagma Square from the lower part, from Stadiou st.
14:56 PM Clashes in front of the parliament building still going on, on Panepistimiou stthere are clashes, taxi drivers union along fellow protesters hold a barricade on Akadimias st. and fighting with the cops, at the moment the only street leading to Syntagma is Stadiou st. Tear gases and chemical gases used by the police in Syntagma but people are not leaving the area.
14.44 PM Gas shot straight into crowd at Panepistimiou metro. Earlier on Patison, anarchists attached the government money-printing building.
14.43 PM In front of the parliament people now have reached the bottom of the staircases that leads to the main building of the Parliament. In front of the parliament again on the other side, stones, molotov cocktails and other items are thrown to the police units guarding the parliament. Tension goes high. Police does not dare to attack, while Syntagma and the Unkown Solider square are occupied by protesters-strikers.

INITIAL POST: Reports from Greece are confused, but indicate that the government has prevailed on a preliminary vote for another round of austerity, with the final one scheduled for tomorrow, while police and protesters clash on the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. Police have cleared protesters from the Syntagma Square in front of the parliament building after wounding 15 people, 6 of them seriously. Prior to the vote, protesters came close to storming the building. Tweets from Theodora Oikonomides give an impression of the intensity of the protests in Athens. For updates, consider the Guardian live blog as well. lenin has a good analysis of the situation here. A 48 hour strike commenced prior to the vote in Parliament continues.

A Brief Report on Occupy Sacramento

2011-10-18T18:46:00.022-04:00

UPDATE 5 (12:07 PM Pacific Time): The livestream shows only one person left in the park, a man in a wheelchair who, according to Kay, was also arrested last Saturday. Several officers have made contact with him, and he is now being wheeled away.

UPDATE 4 (12:05 AM Pacific Time): Livestream is back with arrests ongoing involving as many as 70 officers. 3 of the original 9 people remain in the park according to a Kay report on Facebook moments ago.

UPDATE 3 (11:48 PM Pacific Time): For updates, check out the Occupy Sacramento Facebook page. According to Christina Kay at 11:40 PM: 31 police vehicles, 2 csi, 2 paddy wagons. 9 occupiers. A more recent comment by Kay at 11:47 PM states that there are 50+ officers, with arrests imminent.

UPDATE 2 (11:35 PM Pacific Time): Eight people remain in the park after the Sacramento Police Department broadcasts an order to disperse at 11:24 PM. Police in formation with batons at 10th and J Streets. A second order to disperse was issued moments ago, and the livestream has gone dark.

UPDATE 1 (11:17 PM Pacific Time): The Sacramento City Council has denied a request that the participants in Occupy Sacramento be allowed to camp overnight in Cesar Chavez Park because of fears that the homeless would have to be permitted to do so as well. Up to 54 people have remained in the park past the 10:00 PM curfew, and the police are reportedly preparing to make arrests. For livestream video, go here.

INITIAL POST: Over the last week or so, I have periodically visited Occupy Sacramento in Cesar Chavez Park. About a week and a half ago, on Saturday evening, I participated in a march from the park to nearby Midtown. My young son insisted that we do so, and we did. Upon making its way through the downtown restaurant district along J Street, the march reached 20th and J Streets, the center of the monthly Second Saturday art event for which Midtown is known. As you might have guessed, Midtown has numerous art galleries and has been a countercultural center of Sacramento for decades.

The marchers were both combative and festive, especially upon arriving at 20th and J Streets, where they joined a line of conga musicians and danced in the street. The police presence was, by and large, low key, with the marchers chanting, the police are the 99%. As elsewhere, there is a conscious effort to communicate that Occupy Sacramento is not inherently in conflict with the police. While one can argue with this in terms of historical precedent, the organizers are displaying an impressive pragmatic awareness of the fact that a violent confrontation with the police, no matter how slight, would probably curtail, if not destroy, the movement's potential for growth here. The march was unpermitted, and required marchers to walk along the sidewalk and obey traffic signals. March monitors made sure that there was no pretext for the police to act as they even insisted that marchers make a path for pedestrians to pass on the sidewalk.

Clearly, such fidelity to the letter of the local traffic laws is in marked contrast to the recent leftist emphasis upon Whose Streets? Our Streets! But the importance of challenging the power of the state when it comes to private property and control of streets and sidewalks gave way to more important objectives. First, the primary objective of Occupy Sacramento is to force the city to allow the participants to camp in Cesar Chavez Park without restriction. There have been 58 arrests the park since the occupation began on October 6th, and any arrests during the course of protests separate from this effort could detract from it. After all, the park is, in a sense, the nerve center of the movement, the place were the participants deliberate, conduct teach ins and forums, organize protests and even post information to the Internet through wireless communication. Second, the protests, such as this one, take place after a consensus process of deliberation, hence, it can reasonably be assumed that the participants consciously decided that this march was not the time and place for confrontation, and that should be respected.

I have visited the park several times, sometimes to merely observe and other times to talk with the people that I encounter there. I have seen a racially diverse group of people, perhaps more so than has been reported elsewhere, but this makes sense, as Sacramento has been known for being one of the least segregated cities in the US, although I don't recall a significant Latino presence (by contrast, African Americans are prominent). It is, not surprisingly, impossible to attribute a clear ideological perspective to the people there, although there is a strong left presence, with both anarchists and Marxists well represented. Overall, one gets the impression of people overwhelmed by socioeconomic forces beyond their control, forces that they struggle to identify, much less effectively confront. But, paradoxically, it is this confusion that gives Occupy Sacramento, and possibly the entire Occupy Together movement its strength. In the absence of easily identified enemies, beyond amorphous condemnations of the banks, Wall Street and money in politics, they are tentatively moving towards an indictment of the cash-nexus itself.

Nowhere is this confusion more on display than during the protests of Occupy Sacramento. Last Saturday, there was a march to the State Capital and rally on the north steps to coincide with the October 15th global day of action. Given that it was a Saturday, marchers walked along the sidewalks of a nearly deserted Capital Mall to a deserted state capital. Yet the 200 to 250 participants did so with gusto, and despite what appeared to be garden variety progressive rhetoric at the rally (it was admittedly hard for me to hear a lot of it, because my son was running wildly around the grounds), there was an unmistakeable logic to it all. If the enemy is the dehumanizing power of money, a power that has been rendered more abstract and diffuse, then there was no need for anyone to hear the protesters, to serve as the target for their dissatisfaction. It was enough for them to march down a mall full of office buildings for financial institutions and law firms and conclude with a rally in front of a building known for the acquiescene of its political institutions to the power of capital. One of the more humorous aspects of this march was the fact that my four and half year old son saw the marchers going down the street as we were driving nearby and promptly blurted out We are the 99%! He remembered the chant from the previous march to Midtown.

Beyond this, I'm particularly interested in the day to day activities in the park, the place where the participants interact in assemblies, forums and teach ins. For it is here where the participants seek to make sense of a world gone mad and develop a collective response to it. They struggle to remain respectful of one another during these discussions despite the tremendous variance in their backgrounds and social perspectives. On Sunday, I arrived after a heated discussion about the Citizens United decision between a couple of people, one of whom supported the ruling. A friend of the proponent was critical of the person who argued with him, even though she did not support his stance, because this person, in her view, did so disrepecfully. Of course, one can dismiss this as the elevation of process over substance, but this fails to recognize something that the participants consider more important at this point: the need to create a space where the victims of the existing social order can come together and establish a bond with one another. Otherwise, they will remain isolated and vulnerable.

No doubt, this strikes a leftist ear in an odd, if not jarringly dissonant, fashion. And there is, admittedly, a peril. If one listens carefully, one can hear the echoes of a cyberlibertarian vision, with Wall Street serving as the repository of all of the evils associated with repressive power and privilege. There is, however, only one way for the left to address it, and that is to engage the Occupy Together effort on its own terms. Go the forums, the assemblies, the protests and even the meals and sincerely advocate for anti-authoritarian socialism. Because of the prominent role of anti-authoritarian leftists in organizing this movement, it has already adopted many non-hierarchical practices. Accordingly, now is the time to gently seek to persuade people that these practices prefigure a different way to live. Most importantly, it is essential that we listen as well as speak, because how else are we to learn about the personal and economic distress experienced by so many people? Or, perhaps, more accurately, how else will we understand that those with whom we associate ourselves with politically have an independent, individual agency that must be recognized? Indeed, we must listen before, during and after we speak, because otherwise no one will listen to us because what we say will be irrelvant to them. And, in many instances, it will be best if we just listen and don't say anything at all.

Last year, I read a brief selection by an anarchist in We Are An Image From the Future, a book about the Greek protests of December 2008, released by AK Press. In that piece, the author insightfully observed that the mass protests against the Greek state required anarchists to reevaluate their convictions in light of their experiences, forcing them to accept the fact that people who had been relatively apolitical were now taking the lead and making spontaneous decisions without their assistance. Much the same is now happening with Occupy Together and it is a shocking thing for politically engaged people to accept. And it is happening because of tremendous pain inflicted upon so many Americans in the last 5 or 6 years.

A couple of encounters come to my mind in this regard. Last Wednesday or Thursday, I went over to Occupy Sacramento during my lunch break, and saw a middle aged woman with her two children holding signs on the the southwest corner of the park at 9th and J Streets. The signs were hand made and difficult to read from any distance because much of the lettering was small and sometimes in pencil, but I examined them closely and saw that they insisted upon the need to fund education over finance. I was emotionally overcome by poignancy of the situation, a family so distraught over what was happening that they had to do something, anything, even if it was holding up signs on a street corner that the drivers of passing vehicles could barely read. It was far more effective than any protest I've seen organized by the California Teachers Association.

Today, I had a similar experience. Again, I went over during my lunch break. The number of people there was small, about 25 to 30 people or so. All of a sudden, as I was eating my lunch, a swarthy, middle aged man started yelling, They are taking away our money! They are taking away our rights! They are taking away our dignity! They are going take away our lives! My initial reaction was that he sounded mentally disordered, but as I kept watching and listening, I heard that rare, unmistakable voice of someone who was frightened and angry, so much so that, like the woman and her children, he had to do something, no matter how many people responded to it. He continued to speak in this way, prompting me to think that this is what the ranters during the Glorious Revolution must have sounded like. He walked from the center of the park to the sidewalk along the street, and, upon finishing my lunch, I walked over to him, where he continued to rant as it were, and got his attention. I touched his back with my arm, looked him in the eye, and said, We hear you. I paused as he looked at me, and then said again, We hear you. Always remember that. He thanked me, and I left, chastened by such an intense emotional contact with the desperation that drives people to participate in Occupy Together.

They Are Watching Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-16T12:55:00.006-04:00

From Gawker:

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.
Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world. But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

For more, go here. Of course, this is a typical instance of the privatization of domestic surveillance, the outsourcing of activities too sensitive for governmental institutions like the FBI and NYPD. It also suggests an extension of the practices currently being used against Muslims. If Anonymous was doing the same thing, intercepting NYPD and FBI communications and relaying them to OWS, the FBI would seek to prosecute those involved. One wonders whether disclosures such as this will have a radicalizing effect upon the participants in the Occupy Together effort.

Postmodern Medicine

2011-10-15T00:55:00.011-04:00

Who says that the practice of medicine has to have any relationship to the treatment of real illnesses and injuries?

Designer vagina surgery is big business: according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2009 female consumers spent an estimated $6.8m (£4.4m) on these procedures (the figure counts only plastic surgeons, not gynaecologists). Its popularity is rising in the UK, too – in 2008, the NHS carried out 1,118 labiaplasty operations, an increase of 70% on the previous year. And figures released this year show that plastic surgery company the Harley Medical Group received more than 5,000 inquiries about cosmetic gynaecology in 2010, 65% of them for labial reduction, the rest for tightening and reshaping.
The only reason I know about cosmetic vaginal surgery is that, while researching my latest book, I was given temporary faculty status at the medical school of the university where I teach creative writing, so I could observe obstetrics and gynaecology students. Somehow, I began to get spam emails addressed to Dr Lee, extolling the revenue expanding virtues of learning vaginal rejuvenation. And it's clear at this conference that the bulk of participants are indeed not plastic surgeons but run-of-the-mill obstetricians and gynaecologists who see this as their passport out of traditional practice.
When I ask these doctors about the drastic switch from delivering babies to doing cash-only cosmetic surgeries, many seem uncomfortable. A few sheepishly say they are just exploring their options. The ones already practising cite the rising costs of malpractice insurance, dwindling insurance and government reimbursements (in the US healthcare model, nine months of prenatal care and a normal vaginal delivery nets these primary care providers less than $2,000 [£1,288]). Others talk of a desire for more control over their schedule, rationalising the switch as a family values move.
But the irrefutable fact of the matter is that these cosmetic procedures can make you rich. As one speaker makes a presentation about his successful cosmetic-gyn practice, the wallpaper from his laptop appears on screen: various shots of him with his Porsche. The message is simple. A straightforward labiaplasty, done in-office, in a few hours, nets about $5,000 (£3,222). Enough customers and you, too, can live the good life.

Does one have to be a feminist to find this appalling? Apparently, this is the future of medicine, manipulating the emotional inadequacies of patients about their physical condition so as to persuade them to pay substantial sums of money for unnecessary surgical procedures. Of course, I recognize that this is perversely analogous to the execrable explosion of the number of plastic surgeons willing to perform cosmetic eye surgery for Asians. But be careful about reading the article in its entirety, you will just get angrier, especially if you stay with it until the doctor's joke about how pleased a patient's husband was after a vaginal rejuvenation procedure.

A Ground Level Perspective about Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-14T16:09:00.003-04:00

ohtarzie has taken the time to visit Zuccoti Park and report about what he observed:

When you originally arrive at Zucotti, it seems a bit like an anarcho-hippie encampment redolent of Thomkins Square in the 90s. There is always a very loud drumming circle and all the various things that go along with it, except you don’t smell pot or booze, both of which are banned by the group.
Around the perimeter of the park are people doing agitprop – mostly making or holding posters – who run the political gamut of all political tendencies that have been marginalized from two-party duopoly, including a fair smattering of conspiracy theorists and cranks. The park grounds themselves are covered with the camping gear of the actual occupants, which is alleged to be 600 people, though it does not look that large to me. The hive of activity seems to be the food line, and, in fact, from a distance anyway, food and agitprop-making seem to be the focal points of occupation life.
Now the strange thing is, once the General Assembly starts, the prevailing demographics seem to shift rather dramatically. Overwhelmingly the people most involved in the General Assembly – the people who facilitate, who offer reports from working groups and who pose questions, are clearly of the professional classes, which is betrayed instantly by their appearance and communication style, their savviness in directing discussion and giving instructions, and by the preening, extroverted style that marks many of today’s professionals from both working stiffs and their stodgier predecessors. In other words, they look exactly like the kind of people who went literally insane for Obama in 2008 and many, if not most, probably did.
Though I find this class of people extremely unappealing as a matter of personal taste, their predominance, at least at this stage, is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of them have genuinely wised up and, more importantly, have skills and resources that less advantaged people frequently don’t have, as well as the patience for the grunt work side of revolt. But they also bring the baggage of their conformism, professional ambition and general trust in state authority, as well as religious faith in the inane strains of identity politics that have run interference for the ruling class since the 70s.

Nowhere have I encountered the social dilemma of Occupy Wall Street so concisely described. The resolution of it will determine whether Occupy Wall Street is the beginning of a new era of radical politics or yet another false dawn. Uncharacteristically the optimist, I'm going with the former instead of the latter, well aware that the odds are against me. If the various strands of the left were able to come together and organize the Bloombergville, then I'm hopeful that leftists and liberals can do the same in relation to Occupy Wall Street. Pressure from the ever expanding population of desperate people demand it.

What Occupy Wall Street can do for Barack Obama

2011-10-12T19:15:00.003-04:00

Poor Amy Goodman. She just does not get it. I will quote her summary so that you can save your time and avoid reading the entire commentary: Wall Street firms were among Obama's biggest donors in 2008, and will be again in 2011. He needs us as a counter-weight.

If this is the ultimate objective of OWS, and associated occupations around the country, the participants may as well take down their tents. Fortunately, it isn't. But the fact that people like Amy Goodman are already trying to subordinate the movement to a leader, in this instance, amazingly enough, President Obama, by reducing it to a part of his electoral and governing coalition, should be cause for concern. A grassroots social movement without any express political or partisan affiliation is too threatening to people like Amy, and must be brought to heel by imposing one upon them.

The Modern Inquisition

2011-10-12T17:31:00.010-04:00

UPDATE: An incisive critique of this post in a comment by evildoer:

it raises the question as to whether one of the covert purposes of the war on terror is the desecularization of American life by substituting feudal social practices for those adopted over time in response to the Enlightenment
I think this kind of reverses the historical sequence. The Inquisition was not a feudal practice. In fact, it was an anti-feudal practice that heralded the beginning of thre emergence of "enlightened" institutions in Europe. The roman inquisition developed because heretics were able to rely on support of some local lords and the convoluted system of local feudal rights to avoid represssion. It provided the first bureacratized system of establishing the legal truth that went against local traditions (including juries, ordeals, and feudal arbitration). It was therefore heavily supported by monarchs who wanted to centralize the state and defeat recalcitrant feudal barons.
Comparisons with today are also skewed by legend. For example, the rate of conviction in the courts of the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century were LOWER than the rates of conviction in the US "justice" system today. In other words, a 16th century converso had a better go at convincing a judge that he was a bona fide Christian than a suspect of burglary in the US has of winning a "not guilty" plea today. Most inquisitorial trials ended with minor citations and warning. Some were fined and imposed penance. The Albigensian Crusade, which was the first European genocide, launched by the Kings of Paris with the express goal of exterminating a religious group, was not representative of the inquistion as an institution, but, like the inquisition, it was a major step towards the modern world.

INITIAL POST: Ever since George W. Bush described the US response to the 9/11 attacks as a crusade, there has been a periodic stream of stories analogizing the conflict between the the US, Europe and Islamic fundamentalist groups as a contemporary struggle between Christianity and Islam. Not surprisingly, Christian fundamentalists have promoted this narrative incessantly.

Beyond this, there have been episodes, such as the Marines invoking the protection of God prior to attacking Fallujah in November 2004, wherein the US military perceives itself as an instrument of God's will. Meanwhile, the Air Force has been sharply criticized for permitting Christian fundamentalists to proselytize recruits, frequently in an offensive and coercive manner. But, perhaps, the association between the war on terror and Christianity is more straightforward, revealed through the practices of the purported war itself. Consider, for example, this footnote in Silvia Frederici's Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, a footnote where she elaborates upon the practices utilized by the Catholic Church to suppress heresy:

Andre Vauchez attributes the success of the Inquisition to its procedure. The arrests of suspects was prepared with utmost secrecy. At first, the prosecution consisted of raids against heretics' meetings, organized in collaboration with public authorities. Later, when Waldenses and Cathars had already been forced to go underground, suspects were called in front of a tribunal without being told the reasons for their convocation. The same secrecy characterized the investigatory process. The defendants were not told the charges against them, and those who denounced them were allowed to retain their anonymity. Suspects were released, if they informed against the accomplices and promised to keep silent about their confessions. Thus, when heretics were arrested they could never know if anyone from their congregation had spoken against them. As Italo Mereu points out, the work of the Roman Inquisition left deep scars in this history of European culture, creating a climate of intolerance and institutional suspicion that continues to corrupt the legal system to this day. The legacy of the Inquisition is a culture of suspicion that relies upon anonymous charges and preventative detention, and treats suspects as if already proven guilty.

Preliminarily, observe that this is the Roman Inquisition, an inquistion that predates the more popularly known Spanish one by about 200 years. Upon reading this passage, it is remarkable the extent to which the practices of this inquisition anticipate the ones associated with the war on terror, so much so that it raises the question as to whether one of the covert purposes of the war on terror is the desecularization of American life by substituting feudal social practices for those adopted over time in response to the Enlightenment. The separation of church and state is one of the guiding principles asserted by those influenced by the Enlightenment, and, yet, in regard to the war on terror, the boundary is degraded by the state's adoption of religiously inspired measures to suppress perceived enemies. In effect, the state is seeking to attain the autonomy retained by religious institutions where it comes to the punishment of heretics in order to combine it with the power to project violent force globally. Indeed, it may now be more accurate to speak of the opponents of US global hegemony as heretics instead of the words commonly ascribed to them: radicals, terrorists, militants, anarchists and guerrillas, among others.

We've Been Occupied by Wall Street for Years

2011-10-08T12:16:00.011-04:00

UPDATE 2: 19 arrested in Sacramento late Thursday night and 14 more arrested around midnight Sunday.

UPDATE 1: A man participating in Occupy SF relates how he lost his home through foreclosure, and then concludes, if this has happened to you, take to the streets:

INITIAL POST:

@OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street from adele pham on Vimeo.

Please consider watching this video in its entirety. It is a powerful, first hand account of what motivates people to participate in Occupy Wall Street and how they have emotionally bonded with those they have encountered. It also provides a good opportunity to address an important issue in relation to this movement. One can readily find posts at various Internet locations expressing alarm that labor unions, progressive activist groups affiliated with the Democratic Party and individuals known for their support for Obama are urging support for Occupy Wall Street. Amazingly, even DailyKos has urged people to join the occupations.

Of course, the fear is a legitimate one, the fear that they will seek to substitute their institutional politics for the non-hierarchical grassroots effort emerging all over the country. But there are many people who have learned about Occupy Wall Street, and had it legitimized in their eyes as something to embrace precisely because of this support. One can complain that this reveals a residue of deference to delegated authority, which it undoubtedly true, but misses the essential point: if people don't engage Occupy Wall Street, then there is no way for them to participate in the movement, with its potential for personal and collective transformation. To expect people to throw off the shackles of such authority as a precondition for such participation is implausible.

The man in this video, Malik from Occupy the Hood, is a good example of this phenomenon. He initially went to Occupy Wall Street to observe, noted that figures like Cornel West and Russell Simmons supported it, and, then, based upon this integrated experience, enthusiastically joined the effort. Occupy the Hood is now involved in the organizing of occupations in Detroit and New Orleans. Now, I've seen comments on the Internet where people have denigrated Russell Simmons for his support because of his alignment with Obama and mainstream Democratic Party politics, but, in this instance, Simmons helped motivate Malik to actively participate in Occupy Wall Street.

One of the essential strengths of this movement is the refusal of its participants to relate to people monolithically. There are many people in the AFL-CIO, for example, who don't necessarily agree with everything Richard Trumka and the Executive Board does. Hence, the support of labor unions affiliated with it should not be perceived as perilous, but, rather, an opportunity. Accordingly, drawing lines based upon the past political malfeasance of the AFL-CIO merely serves to segregate many people within it who might otherwise participate in Occupy Wall Street. Now, I'm not being Panglossian here. I'm well aware of past historical episodes like May '68 in France and the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, episodes where the unions exploited the movement for their own ends and eventually killed it. But, it is, in my view, better to seize the opportunity of bringing their members, and the members of similarly situated organizations, into the movement and persuading them to embrace its non-hierarchical practices towards the end of bringing about truly radical change. There is really no other way.

#OccupyWallStreet

2011-10-05T15:54:00.030-04:00

UPDATE 2:

UPDATE 1: A compelling story of insisting upon inclusion within OWS:

On Thursday night I showed up at Occupy Wall Street with a bunch of other South Asians coming from a South Asians for Justice meeting. Sonny joked that he should have brought his dhol so we could enter like it was a baarat. When we got there they were passing around and reading a sheet of paper that had the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street on it. I had heard the Declaration of the Occupation read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn’t realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there. When I heard it the night before with Sonny we had looked at each other and noted that the line about being one race, the human race, formally divided by race, class . . . was a weird line, one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated. But Sonny and I had shrugged it off as the ramblings of one of the many working groups at Occupy Wall Street.
But now we were realizing that this was actually a really important document and that it was going to be sent into the world and read by thousands of people. And that if we let it go into the world written the way it was then it would mean that people like me would shrug this movement off, it would stop people like me and my friends and my community from joining this movement, one that I already felt a part of. So this was urgent. This movement was about to send a document into the world about who and what it was that included a line that erased all power relations and decades of history of oppression. A line that would de-legitimize the movement, this would alienate me and people like me, this would not be able to be something I could get behind. And I was already behind it this movement and somehow I didn’t want to walk away from this. I couldn’t walk away from this.
And that night I was with people who also couldn’t walk away. Our amazing, impromptu, radical South Asian contingency, a contingency which stood out in that crowd for sure, did not back down. We did not back down when we were told the first time that Hena spoke that our concerns could be emailed and didn’t need to be dealt with then, we didn’t back down when we were told that again a second time and we didn’t back down when we were told that to block the declaration from going forward was a serious serious thing to do. When we threatened that this might mean leaving the movement, being willing to walk away. I knew it was a serious action to take, we all knew it was a serious action to take, and that is why we did it.
I have never blocked something before actually. And the only reason I was able to do so was because there were 5 of us standing there and because Hena had already put herself out there and started shouting mic check until they paid attention. And the only reason that I could in that moment was because I felt so urgently that this was something that needed to be said. There is something intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people, but there is something even more intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people with whom you feel aligned and you are saying something that they do not want to hear. And then it is even more intense when that crowd is repeating everything you say– which is the way the General Assemblies or any announcements at Occupy Wall Street work. But hearing yourself in an echo chamber means that you make sure your words mean something because they are being said back to you as you say them.
And so when we finally got everyone’s attention I carefully said what we felt was the problem: that we wanted a small change in language but that this change represented a larger ethical concern of ours. That to erase a history of oppression in this document was not something that we would be able to let happen. That we knew they had been working on this document for a week, that we appreciated the process and that it was in respect to this process that we wouldn’t be silenced. That we demanded a change in the language. And they accepted our change and we withdrew our block as long as the document was published with our change and they said find us after and we will go through it and then it was over and everyone was looking somewhere else. I stepped down from the ledge I was standing on and Sonny looked me in the eye and said you did good and I’ve never needed to hear that so much as then.

Please consider reading Manissa McCleave Maharawal's post in its entirety. Interestingly, she initially declined to go to the encampment, because she had heard or intuited, like her other brown friends, that it was a mostly young white male scene. But the police brutality, and the subsequent protest against it, persuaded her to visit it with a friend. And, afterwards, she persuaded more of her friends to accompany her upon her return. It is tempting to read her account in heroic terms, but it is actually a example of what is perpetually necessary to create and expand the inclusiveness required for any legitimate social movement.

Hat tip to Jews sans frontieres.

INITIAL POST: Preliminarily, it must be acknowledged that Occupy Wall Street is the one of the most significant protest movements of the last 15 years, and retains the potential to become one of the most transformative protest movements in US history. For now, it is comparable in terms of its social impact to the direct action civil disobedience in Seattle in 1998 and the protests against the Iraq war in 2003. It signals the end of the malaise that has, with the exception of the period just prior to the launching of the Iraq war, so immobilized Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11.

Commenced just six days after ceremonies centered around the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the occupation of Wall Street by a small group of protesters shattered the effort of Obama and others to characterize the US as a country defined by the war on terror and the post-9/11 generation who fights it. Veterans have been prominent among the protesters, and they have expressly separated themselves from such a jingoistic portrayal of their experience. A Pew Research Center poll states that 1 out of 3 post-9/11 veterans believes that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not worth fighting and that 6 out of 10 have what the Center describes as isolationist tendencies.

Despite the fact that fewer than three weeks have elapsed since the protests began, the entry of the participants of OWS into the financial district of New York City has already taken on the gloss of historical romanticism, as reported by Kevin Gosztola of firedoglake:

Less than one hundred went into a park on September 17 and did not leave. The police appeared intent on forcing them out of the park but the occupiers found out late in the night they would be allowed to stay. An opening was created. One occupier tweeted it felt like a mini Tahrir Square. And, in the first week, with very little media attention, those who were tired of letting Wall Street and the top 1% ruin their lives and other people’s lives—somewhere between 50 and 200—occupied the park.
Those who slept in the park the first week, especially on the first night, are the vanguard of this movement. They were not part of some known community group or union. They were not affiliated with any campaign launched by any liberal organization. They were not even directly connected to any of the more radical groups in the country, like the Socialist Workers’ Party or Communist Party USA. They were not being visited by celebrities or media personalities. They were just students saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. They were people who were fed up with growing poverty. They were citizens who were no longer willing to tolerate Wall Street influence over politician, who tailor legislation and policies to benefit corporations and the richest 1% at the expense of the other 99% of Americans.

Gosztola isn't entirely accurate here, as it has been reported that anarchists, syndicalists, progressives and communists involved in previous actions designed to highlight poverty and inequality in NYC, such as the Bloombergville, have played a prominent role. Indeed, it appears that OWS evolved out of the Bloombergville earlier this summer:

Part protest base camp/part community center, Bloombergville reclaimed public space for dissent in a way that has not occurred in New York since 9/11. It also created a common ground for a variety of left groups and tendencies to work together in a way also rarely seen in this city.
Operating under the banner of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, the majority of the protesters, like Hales, were in their 20s and 30s, face a future of limited job prospects and see a political system disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people. They drew inspiration from mass occupations of public space that have recently propelled protest movements from Egypt to Spain to Madison, Wisconsin as well as from the Hoovervilles of the 1930s.
Bloombergville organized daily protests of as many as 200 people. These actions culminated in a raucous June 28 demonstration in which 13 people were arrested for barricading the entrance to the office building at 250 Broadway. City Council members, who have offices in the building, were inside negotiating the final details of the budget. A near-riot ensued when police attacked protesters who had surrounded and briefly blocked the two police vans called to carry away the arrestees.
Organized through a general assembly that met each night at 8 p.m., Bloombergville also served as the movement’s living room. People could drop in and share donated food and drink, debate politics for hours, take out books from the Bloombergville Library, attend evening teach-ins at Bloombergville University led by City University of New York (CUNY) professors such as Frances Fox Piven and Stanley Aronowitz or take the stage during open-mic night.

The response to OWS on the left was initially muted. Max Ajl acknowledged that he was initially dismissive because when someone calls a protest in America lately the joke is usually on the Left. Similarly, I didn't think much would come of it, either, which, in a bizarre way, was a positive sign, because I have rarely, if ever, anticipated the success of a protest movement in advance, having been especially gloomy about the ones that generated the most support. Curiously, a post by lenin over at Lenin's Tomb about the anti-semitism of Gilad Atzmon, a post that became a debate over the relative lack of merit of Atzmon and Slavoj Zizek, has generated over 188 comments, while his more recent post about OWS has only generated 29, most of them several days after it originally appeared on the site. One suspects that, among Leninists and Trotskyites, there is apprehension about the lack of any vanguardist leadership and the amorphous nature of the motivations of the participants, even as their allies in NYC have worked actively to organize it.

Conversely, Pham Binh and Louis Proyect have stood out as a clear-eyed, rational left voices about the importance of OWS, probably because they have been able to visit and talk with the protesters. Binh has posted a number of important on the scene reports, such as this one, and both have effectively asserted the importance of relating to OWS in a non-sectarian fashion. Proyect accurately summarized the situation as follows:

There is a very strong possibility that over the next five years or so the mass movement that is taking shape today might take on epic proportions and mount a serious challenge to the powers-that-be. It will be absolutely incumbent upon Marxists to figure out a way to relate to that movement not as learned professors chiding it from above but as dedicated participants whose loyalties are to the movement rather than their own group. If they can meet that challenge, the movement will be all the more powerful as a result. If they function in a narrow and self-interested manner, they will have nothing to offer. As someone who has been impressed with the relative open-mindedness and transparency of the ISO, I wish them well.

Such an admonition obviously applies to leftists of any kind, and not just Marxists.

Meanwhile, the police and the progressive political establishment displayed no such confusion. Faced with a protest movement that showed the potential to become larger and larger, the NYPD moved to suppress it with force, through the indiscriminate use of crowd control measures, pepper spray and and arrests, because, of course, that's what it usually does, and also because, unlike others, it knew, from direct experience, that OWS had evolved out of the Bloombergville, thereby revealing that the vitality of the movement remained even if the Bloombergville had been torn down. For liberals and progressives, the problem was equally acute. Van Jones and his allies, such as MoveON.org, many mainstream unions, such as SEIU and AFCSME, and other progressive organizations, had constructed Rebuild the Dream as a means of channeling social discontent into innocuous forms of protest that do not imperil the reeelection prospects of the President. But then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the people moved forward without them, and they found themselves in the embarrassing situation of having an expensive conference in Washington, D.C. while people were being maced and arrested in NYC. And, even worse, people all over the country announced plans for their own occupations. To show you bad it is, there will even be an occupation in Sacramento, starting tomorrow. Progressives therefore did the only thing they could do if they wanted to avoid becoming politically extinct: they embraced OWS, starting with a large march in NYC today.

Among leftists and progressives, there is this great angst about the need for OWS to issue a statement of demands. I've even posted a couple of comments in response to the suggestions of others at Louis Proyect's site, The Unrepentent Marxist, about the need to prioritize immediate human needs over legalistic reforms of the US financial system. And, while I am nervous about the fact that there seems to be some hesitancy to do so, which may reflect an inability of those involved in OWS to develop a consensus in support of it, such angst misses the point. In his seminal work about the Italian protest movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, States of Emergency, Robert Lumley addressed the transformative aspects of feminism in a climate of social turbulence, emphasizing the ability of its proponents to generate new ways of looking at society by highlighting the subjective differences of people and the challenges of creating a new language in order to express such a perspective. Something similar may well be happening during the collective gatherings of OWS, gatherings in which all are empowered to participate in the actions of the whole. Before people can organize themselves to act politically, they must first understand themselves sufficiently to envision themselves within a movement. It is this paradoxical process of personal and collective evolution that is most threatening to the progressive groups that have embraced OWS, and we will soon learn if they can accomodate themselves to it instead of substituting themselves as they have done in similar instances in the past.

Jack Crow of The Crow's Eye may have captured the mood when he described the people involved in OWS as the self-organized:

It is Emergency which defines our coming age. It is to Emergency - and the preface to our age of Emergency was written in the extended verse of the War on Terror - that every justification for continued maintenance of the forms of power will refer. It is Emergency which mobilizes the masses. It is in the name of a succession of Emergencies that the ruling class and its states will attempt to strangle the arising and invigorated struggles against them.
So it means something, I think, that the folks involved in the OWS experiment have begun by rejecting the acculturated norm of Emergency and its consequent hierarchies, urgency, command orientation and urge to assign marching orders and battle order.
I know for Trots and Leninists like Richard Seymour, and the various dialectically constrained parties of Europe and sheltered academia, the OWS reclaimers and the inherent argument of their method are at best problematic, because it recommends abandoning the hierarchical and partisan organizational mode which dominated resistance to capital, imperial nationalism and colonial powers over the last one hundred fifty years. It further anticipates a fight which exceeds the limits of the party structure, and its intellectualist vanguard, who are obedient to norms which are no longer really prevalent. Those engaged with today's conditions are proving forward enough to identify the functional unity of state and corporation, as well as recognizing that the apparatuses used to obtain, process, share and utilize information, security and the capture of privatized knowledge are nested within each others' overlapping spheres of influence and authority.

The struggle, it seems, has only just begun.

JPMorgan Chase Loves the NYPD

2011-10-03T19:59:00.008-04:00

New York City Police Foundation — New York
JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing profound gratitude for the company's donation.
These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe, Dimon said. We're incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.

According to lenin over at Lenin's Tomb, JPMorgan Chase announced the donation on the same day that approximately 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge for protesting the predations of Wall Street. One wonders what African Americans, Latinos and Muslims think about such a donation. After all, the NYPD has a notorious record when it comes to the use of deadly force against African Americans, as demonstrated by the killings of Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismund and Sean Bell. More recently, it has been criticized for disproportionately stopping and frisking African Americans and Latinos, as they constituted 84% of 576,394 stops in 2009. Similarly, in 2010, they constituted 85% of 601,055 stops. Meanwhile, there have been allegations that the NYPD, with CIA assistance, has engaged in the massive surveillance of American Muslims.

The Assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki

2011-09-30T15:19:00.006-04:00

UPDATE: Was there a deal that enabled Saleh to return to Yemen in return for assistance in killing al-Awlaki? Here was some of the reaction in Yemen:

Fayza Sulieman, a protest leader, said: We always question the timing of these announcements from our government, Saleh is on the backfoot and on the verge of stepping down and suddenly Anwar Awlaki is killed. We all know that Saleh's fight against Al-Qaida is the only thread of support keeping him in office. We pray that this news does not distract the world from our struggle against this tyrannical regime.
Walid al-Matari, an opposition protester at Sana'a's Change Square: They told us about his death in Friday prayer sermons, so what, as revolutionaries it's none our business. Saleh wants to cause problems, position himself as saviour, to get more support. We are not interested in Anwar Awlaki, this is just one man. Our fight is against the corrupt regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

INITIAL POST: The US has killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Intelligence officials provided the following justification:

Following the strike, a U.S. official outlined new details of al-Awlaki's involvement in anti-U.S. operation, including the attempted 2009 Christmas Day bombing of a U.S.-bound aircraft. The official said that al-Awlaki specifically directed the men accused of trying to bomb the Detroit-bound plane to detonate an explosive device over U.S. airspace to maximize casualties.
The official also said al-Awlaki had a direct role in supervising and directing a failed attempt to bring down two U.S. cargo aircraft by detonating explosives concealed inside two packages mailed to the U.S. The U.S. also believes Awlaki had sought to use poisons, including cyanide and ricin, to attack Westerners.
The U.S. and counterterrorism officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence matters.

And, then, there was this exchange between Jake Tapper of ABC and White House press secretary Jay Carney:

Tapper: You said that al-Awlaki was demonstrably and provably involved in operations. Do you plan on demonstrating or proving –
Carney: I — Jake, you know, I should step back. I — he is clearly — I mean, provably may be a legal term. I think it has been well established, and it has certainly been the position of this administration and the previous administration, that he is a leader in — was a leader in AQAP; that AQAP was a definite threat, was operational, planned and carried out terrorist attacks that, fortunately, did not succeed but were extremely serious, including the ones specifically that I mentioned in terms of the would-be Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and the attempt to bomb numerous cargo planes headed for the United States; and that he was obviously also an active recruiter of al-Qaida terrorists. So I don't think anybody in the field would dispute any of those assertions.
Tapper: You don't think anybody else in the government would dispute them.
Carney: I think any — well, I wouldn't know of any credible terrorist expert who dispute the fact that he was a leader in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and that he was operationally involved in terrorist attacks against American interests and citizens.
Tapper: Do you plan on bringing before the public any proof of these charges?
Carney: Again, this is — the question is — makes us – you know, has embedded within it assumptions about the circumstances of his death that I'm just not going to address.

So, the bottom line is that Anwar al-Awlaki was killed because of the President's reliance upon the determinations of unknown credible terrrorist experts who had access to information that is not going to publicized. Hence, we have no idea as to whether he did any of things that have been attributed to him, and the quality of the evidence against him. You may recall that the evidence against the detainees at the Guantanamo hearings wasn't very impressive.

Ron Paul and a few others have expressed alarm about the assassination of al-Awlaki, but, predictably, they place too much emphasis upon the fact that al-Awlaki was an American citizen. Meanwhile, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights appeared to concede that such killings may be acceptable in war zones. In fact there is no meaningful distinction between the killing of al-Awlaki and the many others who have died as a consequence of drone strikes and night raids around the world. Information is limited, but the US military admits that approximately 1000 people were killed as a consequence of these attacks in 2008, with another 400 to 500 killed in 2009. With the increased reliance upon these methods in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010 and 2011, the numbers of the dead have probably increased. Not surprisingly, the death of Samir Khan, who was unfortunate enough to be with al-Awlaki at the time of the attack, is drawing little attention.

A Sunday Afternoon at the Library

2011-09-28T18:32:00.006-04:00

A couple of weekends ago, I took my young son to an event at the downtown library here in Sacramento. It was an event for children with activities, music and a little drama to celebrate Mark Twain, who, because of his brief time in the Central Valley during the Gold Rush, has been adopted as the city's honorary intellectual and author. Certainly, you could do a lot worse, even if the emphasis is upon the Calaveras frog and Tom Sawyer without any acknowledgement of his hostility to plutocracy and imperialism.

I used to work at the superior court less than a block from the library for many years, so I am familiar with the area. Upon arrival for the event, I was surprised at the number of homeless people that I encountered at the library and the adjacent Cesar Chavez Park. I have never seen so many since I first started work at the courthouse in August 1988, and I was employed there through the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, frequently spending my lunch break reading in the park. Perhaps, I haven't been around there recently, and exaggerate it, but I doubt it. One commonly encounters homeless people taking cans and bottles out of recycling bins and offering to wash your windows at gas stations. Of course, this isn't unusual except for the increasing pervasiveness of it. Unfortunately, in this era of austerity, Sacramento County is refusing to fund winter shelters, and it will make life difficult for a lot people. Despite the stereotype about the great weather in California, Sacramento can be harsh in the winter because of the combination of rain, wind and temperatures in the 30 to 50 degree Fahrenheit range. Getting wet in mid-40 to mid-50 degree temperatures is, quite literally, life threatening.

It is just one indication that poverty is becoming a ubiquitous presence in Sacramento. Several weeks ago, I went to another Sunday event associated with my son's youth soccer team. It was a day for taking pictures, among other things, and I asked one of the parents of another kid on the team as to what package they were going to purchase. He explained that he was going to merely request the free one, one where you get a couple of pictures, because he couldn't afford more than that. Mind you, the more inexpensive packages cost $11 and $16 dollars. But that's a lot when you don't have anything. I considered this experience an important indication about the extent of poverty in Sacramento because parents will find a way to purchase these sorts of things about their children if at all possible. My guess is that there is a large number of families who can't even pay for the association fee to get their children into the soccer league.

With the exception of the homeless, people conceal their poverty. Given the egalitarian nature of dress in this country, it is hard to distinguish people in regard to their economic security. But there are measures. Consider this article from the Sacramento Bee yesterday:

During panel discussion on the state's shrinking safety net, Bruce Wagstaff, director of the Countywide Services Agency, said the impact of the situation can be seen at the agency's offices on 28th and P streets, where a long line forms outside every morning before the building opens.
He said the challenges are as great as he has experienced in nearly 40 years in government.
People are going to the agency in record numbers for CalFresh (formerly called food stamps), CalWORKS and cash assistance, and Medi-Cal, Wagstaff said. CalWORKS enrollment is up by about 20 percent; CalFresh enrollment has gone up by about 50 percent.
One in four county residents is served by the county's welfare agency, Wagstaff said.

Meanwhile, the federal government is obssessed with the deficit, a deficit that, paradoxically, will grow if the economy is starved of an effective stimulus. The government has been captured by those with an ideological belief that the populace abuses social support programs and need to be encouraged to rely upon them less. The Obama administration's recent Medicare cost containment proposal is a typical example of it:

The proposal would require new beneficiaries to pay higher deductibles before Medicare coverage of doctors’ services and other outpatient care kicks in. The deductible, now $162 a year, is already adjusted for inflation. Mr. Obama would increase it further by $25 in 2017, 2019 and 2021.
In addition, the White House would increase Medicare premiums by about 30 percent for new beneficiaries who buy generous private insurance to help fill gaps in Medicare.
Many beneficiaries choose these private Medigap policies because they want the financial security they get from the extra insurance. But the White House said this protection gives individuals less incentive to consider the costs of health care and thus raises Medicare costs.

This is, of course, neo-Reaganism, a neoliberalism that punishes people for finding a way to obtain necessary medical care without concern for the cost. Many senior citizens live on fixed incomes, as my mother did, and Medigap insurance is necessary to prevent them from going broke when confronted with the urgency for immediate medical care. My mother was billed over $40,000 for an two emergency room visits and subsequent inpatient care. Without Medigap insurance, she would have been required to pay around $8,000 out of pocket. Fortunately, unlike many, she could have done so, at least this one time, but it goes beyond money. The purpose of such a proposal is to encourage people to deprive themselves of medical care because no one can know the cost with certainty prior to requesting it. It places people in the impossible position of diagnosing their condition before seeing a doctor. Just as union members have been maligned by the President because they have Cadillac plans for their health care, and must therefore, over time, be financially penalized in an attempt to coerce them into abandoning them, so must the seniors savvy enough to protect themselves with Medigap insurance. The cruelty of the neoliberal proponents of such policies is masked by the bland, actuarial language of accountancy, a language the privileges the profit and loss statement over people.

New York's Finest (Part 1)

2011-09-26T14:30:00.005-04:00

An NYPD supervisor maces penned protesters involved in the Occupy Wall Street effort. Just as the so-called war on terror is based upon a policy of preemption, the response to domestic protest is apparently based upon the same principle. Now it is being reported that Anonymous has identified the officer responsible, Anthony Bologna.

Irvine 10 Found Guilty

2011-09-23T23:51:00.003-04:00

Celebrate Perpetual War on 9/11: Conclusion

2011-09-23T13:32:00.006-04:00

Back in August, I ran into someone who told me that they were planning to go to New York City for the 9/11 memorial. A relative of someone they knew had been killed in the attacks. A few days ago, I ran into him again, and he told me about his vacation. I was surprised when he said that he had travelled around the East Coast and Ohio Valley, but hadn't gone to New York City. He proceeded to explain that the victim's family told him that they had no intention of participating in the public ceremonies, and that they considered their loss a private one. For them, 9/11 was an occasion for personal grief and reflection and not one for public display.

Eurocentrism (Part 3)

2011-09-22T12:45:00.012-04:00

UPDATE: Upon looking into the issue further, I discovered that Feministing provided an excellent explanation of the evils of the ban when it first took effect in April:

I am so tired of having to read the qualifier from mostly white Western feminists before any discussion of the veil ban that the veil is sexist but . . . In the context of global patriarchy doesn’t this qualifier belong in front of, like, everything? It seems to me we have a lot easier seeing -isms in a cultural context different from our own, and a lot harder time seeing agency. To veil or not to veil is a question to be navigated by Muslim women – what kind of feminism supports the imposition of values and behaviors on women by a government?
I’m struck by the timing of the ban going into effect, as France re-engages in colonial violence in places like Libya. There were two major flavors of colonialism: kill everyone who was there and take the land for yourself (dominant in the Americas), and fix the backwards people by making them like us, while using their labor and their land, the preferred method of France. People raced as Muslim or Arab were brought into France to serve its economy with very little personal gain in the first place. I can’t help think about this as France engages in violence where they have clear oil interests at the same time they try to stomp out cultural diversity within the nation. The country claims to be secular, but the veil ban is a reminder leadership still holds white, Catholic values. Women are so often the targets of colonial violence, and I see the ban as part of the continued project to make them like us.

So, it would appear that the problem is, yet again, the insistence that middle class feminists are allowed to speak for women of other cultures, regardless of whether these women accept it or not.

INITIAL POST: Secular misogyny in France remains in place:

Kenza Drider's posters for the French presidential race are ready to go, months before the official campaign begins. There she is, the freedom candidate, pictured standing in front of a line of police — a forbidden veil hiding her face.
Drider declared her longshot candidacy Thursday, the same day that a French court fined two women who refuse to remove their veils. All three are among a group of women mounting an attack on the law that has banned the garments from the streets of France since April, and prompted similar moves in other European countries.
They are bent on proving that the ban contravenes fundamental rights and that women who hide their faces stand for freedom, not submission.
When a woman wants to maintain her freedom, she must be bold, Drider told The Associated Press in an interview.
President Nicolas Sarkozy strongly disagrees, and says the veil imprisons women.

Drider makes the observation that the law effectively places women who believe that, for religious reasons, they should wear the veil, under home detention, because going out in public subjects them to insults from the populace and possible arrest. Not surprisingly, she has experienced both.

Drider has therefore revealed the true motivations behind the the enactment of the ban on the wearing of the veil. First, it has the effect of segregating these woman from the rest of French society, much in the same way that early Nazi measures against the Jews, such as the requirement that Jewish businesses identify themselves with a Star of David, did in Germany, and secondly, as occurred in Germany to much greater degree, it empowers the populace to abuse them whenever they encounter them in public. The government is relying upon xenophobes, like those who have historically supported Jean Le Pen and his daughters, to enforce the ban and create a climate of intimidation instead of the police.

Upon encountering this, one wonders, where are the feminists? Are there reports of feminist support for women like Driver? I haven't encountered them, so I'd be curious if any readers have run across any. You'd think that feminists would be concerned about a law regulating the dress of women that has the consequence of driving them underground to avoid public harassment. But no, turns out that French feminists are, by and large, characterized as being proponents of it, providing ideological justification for the measure. Nabila Ramdani, a Parisian born free lance journalist and academic of Algerian descent, has stated that very few feminist groups have actually supported these women's freedom to cover-up, arguing that it is men who are invariably forcing them to do so. Beyond the harassment, the willingness of these feminists to embrace a law that legitimizes French xenophobes is particularly alarming. Combined with the enthusiastic support of some publicly prominent American feminists for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, it is not surprising that feminism is at risk of being trapped in a Eurocentric ghetto because of the cultural biases of its most visible proponents, proponents with more social acceptability and media access than those with a contrary perspective.

Driver herself is a personal refutation of the prevailing French feminist notion that the veil renders a Muslim woman as nothing more than the property of her husband, that it constitutes a form of imprisonment. She wears the veil in public, risking harassment and arrest. She engages in civil disobedience. Even more striking, she is now running for President of France. Of course, she is probably not the norm, but can we really say that there is any norm at all in regard to something so personal as one's religion and one's practice of it? No doubt, there are episodes of domestic violence involving Muslim men and women, but, as As'ad Abukhalil periodically notes, it is highly questionable whether it is more common than domestic violence involving others. Perhaps, if there are feminists who want to liberate the Muslim women of France, it might be a good idea for them to talk to these women without preconditions, and discover what sort of liberation they really need. They don't necessarily believe that banning the veil is part of that process.

Home Invasions

2011-09-21T12:41:00.010-04:00

From CNN yesterday, a story that Anderson Cooper has covered extensively on his show this week:

Witnesses began describing the final moments of and futile attempts to save a Connecticut mother and her two daughters inside their burning home, opening the trial Monday for one of the men who authorities claim is responsible for their murders.
Prosecutors declined to give an opening statement to start the trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky, 31, who faces 17 charges in a brutal home invasion in Cheshire. But they did introduce tapes from two 911 calls, a bank teller who claimed the mother tried to withdraw $15,000 as ransom and a police officer who found Dr. William Petit -- the lone survivor -- fighting for life outside his family's burning home.
The first defendant to stand trial in the case, Steven Hayes, was sentenced to the death penalty in December after being convicted on 16 of 17 charges filed against him.
Prosecutors allege that Hayes and Komisarjevsky went into the Petit home, beat and tied up Dr. William Petit, raped and strangled his wife, molested one of their daughters and set the house on fire before attempting to flee.

Gareth Porter, today:

A military officer who had approved night raids told one of the authors that targeting individuals believed to know one of the insurgents is a key factor in planning the raids. If you can’t get the guy you want, said the officer, you get the guy who knows him.
Even when people who are known to be civilians have not been targeted in a given raid, they have been detained when found on the compound of the target, on the ground that a person’s involvement in the insurgency is not always clear until questioned, according to military officer who has been involved in operational questions surrounding the raids interviewed for the report.
Raids prompted by the desire for intelligence can result in the deaths of civilians. The Afghan Analysts Network, a group of independent researchers based in Kabul, investigated a series of night raids in Nangarhar province in October and November 2010 and found that the raids were all targeting people who had met with a local religious cleric who was believed to be the Taliban shadow province governor.
Two civilians were killed in those raids when family members came to the defense of their relatives.

According to Time, the US stages approximately 40 raids every night. Porter states that the number of raids in neighboring Pakistan is kept secret. Beyond this, it is important to remember that US forces have only successfully targeted the right homes, businesses and individuals about 50% of the time, leaving aside the question as to whether they were properly selected at all.

Last year, there was this incident in Afghanistan:

Days after the raid in Surkhrod, the fear and outrage were still palpable — and the bloodstains and bullet holes still much in evidence.
Accounts by villagers, including Kushkaki, the head of the extended family of men, women and children living in the compound, suggested that gunfire had erupted without warning shortly after 1 a.m. Most of those inside, together with farmworkers on rope cots out in the courtyard, were fast asleep, they said.
My brother ran out to see what was happening; he was killed right away, Kushkaki said. My son ran out too and was shot as well. I carried him inside in my arms, but he bled to death, here on this carpet.
The American officials describe a much different scenario: the arriving troops, through Afghan interpreters, making repeated calls through bullhorns for those inside to come outside — a practice they say is always adhered to.
It's literally a script, said one of the task force officials, adding that the call-out was answered with a hail of gunfire from inside the compound.
Family members acknowledged firing AK-47s at the invaders, but insisted they did not know they were shooting at Afghan and American forces.
We thought they were thieves, raiders, said Kushkaki. Other family members said any warning might have been drowned out by the sound of a storm that night.
Family members said that when the shooting broke out, they called the police, an assertion supported by the district police chief, Said Ghafour. The gun battle was in full swing by the time he and his men arrived, Ghafour said, and they were kept 200 yards away from the scene.
Ghafour said he knew nothing of the raid in advance; the U.S. military said the strike had been coordinated with provincial leaders. When authorities at the district level are not told in advance about a raid, the American officials said, it is generally because of concerns about corruption or insurgent sympathies that will lead to the target being tipped off.
All the deaths — eight by the Americans' count, nine by the family's — occurred in the first 45 minutes of contact, the U.S. officials said.
Kushkaki said he believed his 16-year-old son had run from the house unarmed. The American officials said he would have been shot only if he had a weapon in his hands, but they could not be certain that he did.

And, then, there was this one:

It was two o’clock in the morning on Feb. 15. Mullah Abdul Khaliq, who taught at a local school here in Nawa district, was asleep with his family when the helicopters began circling overhead.
We could not leave our houses, said Abdullah, a neighbor of Mullah Khaliq’s. Everyone understood that the U.S. forces were carrying out a raid somewhere, and we were all afraid. In the morning we found out that something was very wrong at the house of Mullah Khaliq.
U.S. forces had broken into Khaliq’s house and what happened next is an all too familiar scenario to the people of this beleaguered district, which has now been caught for almost two years between the Taliban and the U.S. military.
The wife told me that her son ran out of the house and was shot on the spot, recounted Abdullah. They then asked Mullah Khaliq if he was Taliban. He said ‘no we are not,’ but they searched the house and shot him in the head. His other son is missing. We saw blood, he must have been injured. His nephew, who was visiting, was also killed.

Prosecutable as heinous crimes at home, a preferred counterinsurgency strategy abroad.

US Approved Content on Al Jazeera

2011-09-20T23:15:00.000-04:00

From a US diplomatic cable released by wikileaks, describing communications between the public affairs office of the US embassy in Doha and then Al Jazeera Managing Editor Wadah Khanifar on October 18, 2005:

¶7. (C) PAO raised the question of an Al Jazeera website piece published in the last week, listed under the heading Special Coverage, and containing Live Testimony Concerning Tal Afar. The site opens to an image of bloody sheets of paper riddled with bullet holes. Viewers click on the bullet holes to access testimony from ten alleged eye witnesses who described recent military operations in Tal Afar.
¶8. (C) Khanfar said that, in accordance with an earlier promise to PAO (Ref B), he had taken a look at the piece and had two images removed (two injured children in hospital beds, and a woman with serious facial injury). PAO pointed out that the testimony of a doctor in the piece also implied that poison gas had been used on residents of Tal Afar and that the appearance of the piece, in particular the bloody bullet hole icons, came across as inflammatory and journalistically questionable. Khanfar appeared to repress a sigh but said he would have the piece removed. Not immediately, because that would be talked about, but over two or three days, he said.
¶9. (C) He said he had told the website staff that in future, when they want to add an item to the Special Coverage section of the website, they should send a draft of the idea over to his office. (Note: The AJ website is located in a separate building across town. End note.) He noted that until two or three months ago, the website staff had enjoyed much more autonomy. Now, however, website director Abdel Aziz Al Mahmoud attends the weekly editorial meetings at the TV channel offices, and the website staff is being pulled under the umbrella of the same editorial standards as the TV channel. I don't say that such things are not going to be repeated on the website, but it is a learning process, said Khanfar.

Khanifar resigned from Al Jazeera earlier this week upon the release of this cable, as well as some other ones, by Al-Akhbar in Lebanon.

The Hinkiness of Bill Keller (Part 2)

2011-09-12T12:34:00.006-04:00

UPDATE: Was there any doubt that Bill Keller adores Christopher Hitchens? Bullies that give their thuggery an intellectual gloss, like Paul Wolfowitz as well, make him swoon. I'd love to hear what Hitchens privately thinks of Keller. I can't imagine that it's very flattering.

INITIAL POST: Krugman concisely condemns Keller's self-absorbed rationalization for his mistaken support for the invasion of Iraq, and posts it to his New York Times blog on the morning of 9/11:

How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

Within the overall context of the post, which specifically indicts those who exploited 9/11 for the purpose of generating public support for the invasion of Iraq, it is hard to see this statement as anything other than a thinly veiled criticism of those at the New York Times, like Keller, who publicly advocated for the invasion. He may well have decided to post it after reading Keller's evasion of responsibility earlier in the week. Refreshingly, Krugman, unlike Keller, is able to reach his own conclusions about such matters in the absent of manipulative references to his children.

One can certainly quibble about Krugman's statement. He doesn't object to the invasion and ongoing occupation of Afghanistan as well. At the time, he wasn't much of a voice against going forward with either invasion. To quote Patrick Buchanan, he hid out in the tall grass. Regardless, he pissed all over the sentimental, sanctimonious coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by the Times, and he did it with an extraordinarily timed post as the ceremonial events were taking place: The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Egyptians Storm Israeli Embassy in Cairo (Part 2)

2011-09-10T12:05:00.003-04:00

UPDATE: Anger on the streets of Cairo, and the use of armored personnel carriers to defend the Israeli embassy:

INITIAL POST: The kind of political reform in Egyptian desired by the US, Israel and the military council:

Egypt says it will send those who incited or took part in the violence targeting the Israeli embassy in Cairo to a emergency state security court.
After a meeting of the ministerial crisis group and talks with Egypt's military ruler, Information Minister Osama Hassan Heikal made the announcement in a televised statement after Israel, the US and other countries criticised the storming of the tower that houses the embassy.

And, here's another example:

Information Minister Osama Heikal said in a televised message that Egyptian authorities will apply all articles of the emergency law to ensure safety following the embassy attack.
Egypt affirms its total commitment to respecting international conventions, including the protection of all [diplomatic] missions.

Apparently, the defense of the Camp David accords requires the imposition of a state of emergency on the streets of Cairo.

Meanwhile, the nationalistic mood may be accurately captured by the following:

As reported by Reuters news agency, Mustafa Yahya's mother wailed and tore her robe in the Cairo hospital where her son's body lay in the morgue, accusing her own country's troops of killing him as they defended Israel's embassy from protesters overnight.
To hell with Israel. Why is the army protecting Israel and killing my children? she screamed, voicing the popular anger that has been well and truly unleashed since six Egyptian border guards were killed last month in an Israeli operation against a cross-border militant raid.

The global response borders on the hysterical. A perusal of the Guardian blog reveals a parade of countries and political figures rushing to issue public statements condemning the attack. At least 3 people were killed and over 1,000 injured during street clashes.

Egyptians Storm Israeli Embassy in Cairo (Part 1)

2011-09-09T14:31:00.011-04:00

UPDATE 4: As'ad Abukhalil:

I can't relay the excitement and jubilation that was expressed by Arabs from around the world on twitter and Facebook all day yesterday, regarding the storming of the Israeli occupation embassy in Cairo. I had told you that it will be a different Middle East. The sinister intelligence apparatus that was put in place by the Camp David regime crumbled. I will say more on this in my next post for Al-Akhbar English.

UPDATE 3: A more general Al Jazeera English report:

UPDATE 2: According to Al Jazeera English, the police have been involved in clashes with protesters, firing tear gas, with the Egyptian health ministry reporting 300 injuries. Here is an interview with one of the protesters:

No one should be surprised by this. Israel supported Mubarak unequivocally, despite his creation of a police state that oppressed millions of Egyptians. As noted by the protester interviewed in the video, the construction of a wall around the Israeli embassy in Cairo was a inflammatory provocation, the symbolic incorporation of Egypt within the occupied territories.

UPDATE 1: From the Guardian:

Egypt declared a state of alert early this morning after a group of 30 protesters broke into the Israeli embassy in Cairo last night and dumped hundreds of documents out of the windows.
The storming of the building came after a day of demonstrations outside where crowds swinging sledgehammers and using their bare hands tore apart the embassy's security wall. Hundreds of people converged on the embassy throughout the afternoon and into the night, tearing down large sections of the graffiti-covered security wall outside the 21-storey building. For hours, security forces made no attempt to intervene.
A security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because not authorised to speak to the media, said that one group of protesters reached a room on one of the embassy's floors at the top of the building just before midnight and began dumping Hebrew-language documents from the windows.
The prime minister, Essam Sharif, summoned a crisis cabinet meeting to discuss the situation. In Jerusalem, an Israeli official confirmed the embassy had been broken into, saying it appeared that the group reached a waiting room. In Cairo, officials at the capital's airport said the Israeli ambassador was there waiting for a military plane to evacuate him, and other Israelis were also waiting for the flight to take them back to Israel.

INITIAL POST: This is an important story, with marginal coverage in US and European media. Protests have been ongoing for several weeks now. The Egyptian military responded to the removal of the flag from the embassy by constructing a wall around it, but Egyptians in Cairo have damaged it today during renewed protests. The protests are apparently interwined within larger disputes between the governing military council and secular left groups within Egypt over the nature of political reform. From afar, it appears that the military council and the Muslim Brotherhood are trying to protect their privileged political status by permitting some confrontational protests against the Israelis, while preserving the relationship created by the Camp David accords. But what happens if the military is forced to choose between the preservation of its economic power, the profits that high ranking officers receive from industries controlled by the military, and the continuation of its pro-Israel policy? Is anti-Zionism the means by which the class struggle in Egypt will be intensified?

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