Here is a picture I took looking up at the Downtown L.A. Bank of America building from a patch of grass owned by Brookfield Properties, the same owners of Zuccotti Park in NYC.  This picture was taken just before my arrest defending an encampment in a solidarity action on November 17.

I wrote about the action an my arrest experience here.

Here are some highlights from around the country:

NEW YORK CITY

The eviction of Zuccotti (Liberty) Park took place under a media blackout, so there is not a lot of imagery or video available, for example, of the trashing of the OWS People’s Library, but there are plenty of eyewitness reports of police brutality and destruction of property. The best immediate coverage of the raid I saw was here, but this video from OccupyTVNY shows the progression of the eviction from the inside:

And, by the way, here is an image of an LRAD weapon on the scene — an increasingly prevalent weapon against peaceable assemblies.

OAKLAND

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan accidentally let it slip that cities coordinated the crackdown on Occupy Movment. (On this coordination, see also here and here and here.)

Here is a video documenting eviction night.

See here, for what what might happen to you if you film Oakland PD “protecting” the community.

And see here, for a quick tour of post-raid Occupy Oakland. Actually for informative updates on Occupy Oakland in general see zunguzungu.

PORTLAND

See here for more on “The Battles of Occupy Portland”, and here for a short video documenting Occupy Portland preparing for the eviction.

And of course, can’t fail to include this image:

SEATTLE

In Seattle, SPD pepper sprayed people indiscriminately, including an 84-year old woman and a pregnant woman.  See also here.

U.C. BERKELEY

As Stephen Colbert put it, “Look at these vicious students attacking these billy clubs with their soft jabbable bellies!“

For more, see here.

U.C. DAVIS

The pepper spraying incident was followed by this “Powerfully Silent Protest” against the University Chancellor who defended the campus police’s vile behavior.

CHAPEL HILL, NC

Source.

There were other evictions of Occupations in St. Louis, Denver, and other cities.

For even more videos and images of police pepper spray and violence, see the Atlantic’s collection.

Also, its horizontalidad confuses repressive authorities, who — because they think hierarchically — look for a leader to arrest. But arresting or evicting any given wielder of the microphone proves futile, since the people’s voice then merely shifts to another body and the message continues.

See peoples’ mic at work elsewhere:

• during a speech by the C.E.O. of Blue Cross/Blue Shield at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• during a speech by the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo in Minnesota
• during the proceedings of a “Birthright Israel” indoctrination

I wondered whether I, neophyte matador, could bring down this behemoth, world-famous for charging towards profit while trampling underfoot the average worker,” said the OWS activist/torero whose first fight this was. “Come what may, I knew I must try.

(A visual representation of the "Declaration of the Occupation of NYC" by OWS-NYC's Arts and Culture and Call to Action Working Groups.)

The horizontalidad of the Occupation Movement has confused hierarchical systems of propaganda, which is only capable of registering PR-crafted soundbites.

Confusing the complicated harmonies of mass popular protest for an incoherent cacophony, the corporate media multiplex has ridiculed the Occupy Movement for lacking clear “demands”.

But as Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate, “It takes a walloping amount of willful cluelessness to look at a mass of people holding up signs and claim that they have no message…. [just as] it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling.”

I generally agree with Lithwick’s conclusion that, “[b]y refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance.”

Still, while it is true that the OWS General Assembly consensed on a list of grievances (subsequently endorsed by the GA in L.A. and other cites),  one can’t deny that the Occupy Movement as a whole has yet to issue a tight list of demands or statements of purpose or plans of action.

But this lack of clear direction is precisely what should be expected from a spontaneous uprising that seeks to unite “the 99%” by means of non-heirarchical consensus-based deliberative mechanisms. Firstly, such mechanisms can take a great deal of time, as anyone who as participated in a General Assembly can attest. Secondly, the problems with the current political order are deep and complicated and pervasive, so jumping to conclusions on how to address them would be irresponsible.

Writing for VersoBooks, Mc Kenzie Wark argues that the lack of quickly formulated demands is actually a strength of the Occupy Wall St. movement, in part because it shows that the movement is actually focusing on process.

Still, the demand for demands is not limited to the Corporatist media.  It is also pervasive in the Occupation camps themselves, if I can extrapolate from my experiences at Occupy Los Angeles.

OLA’s “Obejectives and Demands Committee”, in which I am a regular participant, was originally called the “Demands Committee” and over the course of the last 5 weeks has spent many hours debating question of demands:

Doesn’t the concept of “demands” reinforce the power of those from whom we demand things? Aren’t we rather seeking to “alter or abolish” those institutions of state power? Wouldn’t it be better, rather, to formulate “objectives” for the movement? And given the diversity of the Occupiers in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, ideology, etc., what is the proper way to organize and prioritize and reach consensus on language that seeks to express the highest aspirations of the collective movement?

These questions are difficult and deep, and I am glad that the L.A. Occupation has been taking these questions and responsibilities seriously by allowing the horizontal processes to play out, as imperfect as these processes can be sometimes.

But as philosopher Slavoj Zizek has warned in the Guradian, we should not forget the endgame:

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organisation” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question, “What is to be done?“

With this warning in mind, however, Zizek argues that the greatest threat to the movement is not its lack of a clear program but rather those “false friends” who in effect seek to “dilute the protest” by funneling movement energy into prepackaged and establishment-friendly soundbites.  He cites Bill Clinton as an example, who chides the movement for not being “for something specific” and who suggests that it “get behind President Obama’s jobs plan”.

While such a move would suddenly make the movement intelligible to the corporate media complex — by forcing it back into a democrat / republican, liberal / conservative, etc., mold — it would at the same time drain it of its revolutionary potential. Zizek concludes:

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

The movement’s lack of clear program can be seen as an important strength, in other words.  Not only does it thereby cast a wide net over the frustrations of “the 99%”, the very under-articulacy of the growing movement can be ominous and properly threatening.

This sentiment is nicely captured in a tweet from Malcom Harris, after Bank of America dropped its proposed monthly $5 debit card fee:

It’s great how we won that demand about debit card fees. Wait, we didn’t demand anything? But then how did they know what to give us?

It is beginning to be possible to detect other “victories” of the Occupy Movement as political institutions respond to its challenge, even in the absence of a particular plan of action: Unions are embracing bolder tactics, according to the NYT,  and FDL is crediting the movement with changing the “dominant conversation” from “deficits and debt” to “inequality and economic justice.”

Its mere continued existence, in other words, can be seen itself a clear articulation.

By focusing on processes for reaching consensus on fundamental questions, objectives and strategies, the Occupy Movement frustrates familiar narratives and trajectories as it gathers strength.

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

-Chris Hedges

Over the past decade and more, as a radio journalist and videographer, I have covered and documented scores of protests and marches. But the current wave of occupations of political spaces is the first that has felt like a movement.

Full disclosure: When it comes to Occupy Los Angeles, I am no longer just an observer but a participant in what feels like a genuine exercise of democracy — leaderless, but deliberative, movement building around shared principles.

In New York, where the occupation of Zuccotti Park is in its fourth week, the movement continues to meet with police repression, exemplified most notoriously so far by the absurd pepper spraying of nonviolent young women and the entrapment and arrest of 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge.

(Here is a video showing the step-by-step development of the mass arrest that took place on October 1, 2011. Here is longer, more detailed edit. These videos, from OccupyTVNY show police leading the march onto the bridge and then trapping the marchers from behind.)

Occupation Los Angeles has fortunately been largely free so far from police harassment — due in part to political and / or principled decisions on the part of certain members of the Los Angeles City Council.

Council Member Richard Alarcon, for example, sent an important memo to the LA Chief of Police and City Attorney the night before the LA Occupation began which urged that they “provide a reasonable accommodation” to the movment “in order to both protect the City’s interests and to allow this group to peacefully exercise its’ First Amendment rights”.  Furthermore, Alarcon advised,

it would be unwise for our City to be overly aggressive and change the story from what it is — a protest against financial institutions — into a story about the City being inhospitable to peaceful demonstrations of civil rights.

So OccupyLA has been left largely at liberty to do its thing. But many who have yet to participate in this movement remain confused about the point of it all.  They search in vain for “demands” formulated as sound bites, and bemoan the apparent haphazardness of it all.

But this movement, which aspires to unite the “99%” against the runaway wealth and power of the 1% at the top — “the Wall St. oligarchs and corporate plutocrats”, in the words of Cornell West — has set for itself a very difficult task.

The 99% is itself divided by class, race, culture, ideology and much else besides — so while everybody agrees that there is something wrong, reaching consensus on the the best way to identify and fix the problems we all face is is a monumental challenge that takes time.

Jumping to conclusions without passing through the crucible of committee discussions and consensus at General Assemblies would shatter the movement and defeat its purpose.

Nevertheless, slowly but surely, consensus building is taking place.

On Sept 30 The General Assembly of Occupy Wall St., the epicenter of the Occupy Movement, reached consensus on a general declaration of grievances. This declaration was then formally endorsed by the General Assembly in Los Angeles on October 8.

Inspired in part by popular uprisings in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, the “Occupy Wall St.” has managed to maintain a presence in NY’s financial district for 10 days. Meanwhile, corporatist/nationalist “mainstream” media ignores the movement as the police brutally crack down on the non-violent mostly young protesters.

Anthropologist and Activist David Graeber (whose books I highly recommend) has an essay in the Guardian suggesting that what we are watching are “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans” who are demanding “a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008″:

There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible…

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Meanwhile, members of the emerging defiant generation who take action against Wall St. crime are met, predictably, with the heavy cloven hoof of the pigs — witness this video of these peaceful young women getting corralled and pepper-spayed for daring to express their 1st Amendment Rights:

NYPD spokesliar Paul Browne asserted that this use of pepper spray was “appropriate“.

Various other coverage on the Web:

• Buzzfeed has posted 32 Pictures from the protests, highlighting NYPD brutality against the protesters.
• DemocracyNow ran a segment this morning which including interviews of women battered, pepper-sprayed and encaged by the police.
• Current TV’s K. Olberman has a segment about the “mainstream media” blackout and on why Tea Party protests of similar size get headlines.
• BaNewsNotes has some interesting discussion about some of the images coming out of the conflict.

A solidarity movement is starting to manifest in Los Angeles (#OccupyLA), with a demonstration planned today (Monday) at 2Pm at Santa Monica and Crescent Heights to coincide with Obama’s fundraising visit.

Local Activists are also planning an occupation of Downtown beginning October 1.

Davis maintained his innocence until the very end, and among his last words were these directed at the family of the off-duty police officer killed in 1989:

I’d like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother, I am innocent.

Here, btw, is a list of exonerated death row inmates in the United States since 1970. (h/t a35mmlife)

Obama did nothing to stop the state lynching, claiming through his spokesliar that it wouldn’t be “appropriate” to weigh in on the situation since it is a state prosecution — even though earlier this year he had done precisely that in the Texas case of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. (h/t scahill)

A last minute emergency appeal was presented to Supreme Court Justice Uncle Clarence Thomas, but the Court rejected the appeal with no explanation in a one line decision, aptly described by Jeremy Scahill as exemplary of the “banality of evil”:

To the right is an image of the slain cop’s mother thanking Merciful White Jesus for making the State of Georgia kill some random black guy as revenge for the death of her son.

Other notes:

Micheal Moore is asking his publisher to “remove all copies” of his new book “from every bookstore in Georgia”, and calling for a general boycott of the state of Georgia.

DN has an hour long special of the aftermath of Davis’ execution.

Here is the ACLU’s statement.

Here is a message from Troy Davis himself to his supporters:

The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me.

Get involved in the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and/or sign this Amnesty Petition.

And here is Billie Holiday on the Situation: