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.
In the last weeks, the world has witnessed a massive and coordinated national crackdown on the Occupy Movement, culminating in an early morning raid on the original encampment in Zuccotti Park by the NYPD and NYDS under the direction of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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
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.
One of the reasons the Peoples’ Mic is an effective tool for overcoming institutional censorship is that it relies on no technology whatsoever — nothing that requires electricity and nothing that can set off a metal detector. All it requires is a group of people committed to communicating a message.
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:
From Yes Lab:
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.
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.
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:
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.
The uprisings in throughout the Middle East and Europe have demonstrated the power of the internet and social networking sites as tools for organizing against the state. It is because of their efficacy that these information sharing technologies have been suppressed by entrenched powers.
But does the cloud of internet censorship offer a silver lining?
Focusing on the CLOUD, G. Greenwald notes how the powers-that-be are making moves to seize control and snuff out the potential of these tools to disrupt the prevailing social order. The censorship for which the West has “long righteously denounced China” and “vocally condemned Arab regimes” is steadily being adopted in the U.S. and Europe as a knee-jerk response to any challenge to and hint of social upheaval or mass action.
After the riots in London, for example, “the instant reaction of Prime Minister David Cameron was a scheme to force telecoms to allow his government the power to limit the use of Internet and social networking sites.” This, in conjunction with an campaign to lock people up for “inciting disorder” on facebook — these two guys were given four year sentences.
And more recently in San Fransisco, during a protest of yet another subway station killing at the hands of the out-of-control BART cops, “city officials shut down underground cell phone service entirely for hours“.
These episodes take place in an environment of aggressive prosecutions against all type of free-information activists such as Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Anonymous, Aaron Swartz and others. At the same time, legislators are proposing bills to make it easier for the government to spy on the online activities of its citizens. (See also this.)
But at least one target of this cloud of censorship likes to stress its SILVER LINING. In an interview I posted about recently between the Wikileaks founder and philosopher Slavoj Zizek, Assange pointed out that although the sudden rise of such “McCarthyist hysteria” is worrying, nevertheless such official responses and attempts at censorship are in fact a “positive sign”:
Power that is completely unaccountable is silent. You know when you walk past a group of ants and you accidentally crush a few? You do not turn to the others and say “stop complaining” or I’ll put a drone strike on your head — you completely ignore them.
And that is what happens to power that is in a very dominant position. It does not even bother to respond — it doesn’t flinch for an instant. And yet we saw all these figures in the United States coming out and speaking very aggressively…
We should always see censorship, actually, as a very positive sign. And the attempts toward censorship as a sign that the society is not yet completely sewn up, not yet completely fiscalised, but still has some political dimension to it, i.e. what people believe and think and feel and the words that they listen to actually matter. Because in some areas it doesn’t matter. And in the United States, actually, most of the time, it doesn’t matter what you say. We managed to speak and give information at such volume and at such intensity that people actually were forced to respond. It is rare that they are forced to respond. So I think this is one of the first positive symptoms I’ve seen from the United States in a while. That actually if you speak at this level, the cage can be rattled a bit, and people can be forced to respond.
In China, the censorship is much more aggressive, which to me is a very hopeful symptom of China, that it is still a political society even though it is fiscalizing, even though everything is being sewn up in contractual relationships and banking relationships as time has gone by. At the moment, the Chinese government and Public Security Bureau are actually scared of what people think.
Pelican Bay SHU, a stripped and cuffed inmate, and the wide open space of the exercise yard.
Pelican Bay “Security Housing Unit” inmates have been on hunger strike since July 1, in protest of the nightmarish conditions of their captivity.
They are kept in total isolation, under constant florescent lighting, in a 8′X10′ cell 22 1/2 hours a day. If they are lucky they get an hour in a slightly larger concrete yard (pictured above right, from images taken from this photo essay).
Some of the hunger striking inmates have been held in the SHU for decades.
As Jeff Kaye stresses at FDL, one of the core demands of the hunger strikers is an end to the “debriefing” process, whereby prisoners are held in the SHU until they snitch or make up evidence against another inmate — an act which can put the prisoner and his family in danger.
The only other way out is to die or to complete your sentence in the SHU — what prisoners call “snitch, parole or die’.
The San Francisco Bay View has been all over this story, documenting the solidarity demonstrations in various cities and updates on negotiations between the prisoners and the Dept. of Corrections. Particularly interesting are the journal entries from hunger striking prisoners themselves — here is Richard Johnson on the “psychology of prisoners” as well as the challenges of “aging in prison”.
The Economist adds that inmates in “at least 11 of California’s 33 prisons” have joined the hunger strike in solidarity, and puts the current California prisons crisis in the broader context of the last several decades of “tough on crime” legislation:
The tale of how California’s prison system deteriorated to this point spans decades. In 1977 Jerry Brown, governor then as now, signed a law introducing determinate sentencing, limiting the discretion of judges and parole boards. Politicians and voters then added hundreds of new laws, all claiming to be “tough on crime” by punishing ever more offences with prison, and making prison terms ever longer.
Most famous of these was the 1994 ballot measure called “three strikes and you’re out”. Sponsored by the prison-guards union, it requires criminals convicted a second time to get double the usual sentence, while those with a third “strike” must get 25 years to life. Other states copied California, but California’s version is still the harshest, allowing even a non-violent or trivial third strike to result in a life term. In another six ballot measures between 1978 and 2000, voters also reintroduced and expanded the death penalty.
Here is a brief video update from TheRealNews.com and FSRN:
(I used to file audio reports with FSRN, btw. Here is one from 2004 about the 10th anniversary of the “three strikes” law.)
Consider this recent AT&T commercial:
Set in NY’s Grand Central Station, a man in a trench-coat anxiously watches the clock, tick-tock, until it strikes 12, whereupun he throws his coat to the floor and dances. After a while he realizes that he is dancing alone, and then he gets a text — the flash mob has been moved to 12:30.
Still undercover, the other flash mobsters shake their heads at him in disappointment.
“Don’t be the last to know,” asserts the voiceover/spokesman, “Get it faster with 4G.”
Mildly amusing commercial, I suppose, abstracted from its source and function.
Seen in context, however, and particularly in relation to the recent spate of arrests and tacklings of public dancers at the Jefferson Memorial, the commercial exemplifies a disturbing trend of the corporatist hegemon.
Compare commercial fantasy with political reality:
In the ATT commercial, you have one of the most powerful corporations on earth, whose political donations and army of lobbyists tether elected officials “right” and “left” to its private interests, selling their (possibly brain-carcinogenic) tracking devices smart phones to a thoroughly consumerist populace by means of the dream of dancing publicly without being arrested and violently tackled to the ground by organic drones.
In the video of the Jefferson Memorial dancing arrests, on the other hand, you have actual human beings (including an Iraq War Vet) dancing publicly only to be arrested and violently tackled to the ground by organic drones.
These dancers were motivated by an earlier Jefferson Memorial dancing arrest, and culminated in yet another dance protest at the same site which resulted in no arrests — a mild victory for the protesters. Perhaps too mild to celebrate, according to one fellow traveller:
If the world were watching, the reaction might be a little like mine—that US Empire continues to exact unbearable human suffering throughout the world in the name of democracy. Compared to the atrocities being committed in our names, crowing about not getting arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial is supercilious and obnoxious.
Nevertheless, the comparison between the ATT fantasy and the political reality indicates the growing chasm between the relative rights of corporate and human “persons”.
The Espionage Act of 1917, initially employed to imprison socialist war critics and movie makers and poets during World War I, is now being used as a tool in the Obama Administration’s unprecedented assault on whistle blowers who seek to expose government crime and waste.
This crackdown on whistle blowers is in characteristic contrast to Obama’s campaign rhetoric about becoming “the most transparent administration in history”.
While Candidate Obama promised to protect whistle blowers and even praised their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and save taxpayer dollars”, the President Obama, according to Jane Mayer’s report in the New Yorker, seeks to convict them under the Espionage Act as ‘Enemies of the State’:
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.
Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”
Glenn Greenwald adds:
And that’s to say nothing of the full-scale immunity also given thus far to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill, and the mortgage fraudsters who have essentially stolen people’s homes.
Juan Cole points out that the nature of NSA crimes being exposed by whistle blowers such as Drake gives the perpetrators powerful leverage over those from whom they might, in a functioning democracy, face accountability:
The thing that worries me most is that the government officials who break the law by engaging in illegal surveillance are the ones best able to blackmail judges and politicians and journalists. Part of the story of the gradual destruction of the Bill of Rights, i.e. the Constitution, probably lies hidden in those corrupt shadows.
