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.
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.
Congressional Leaders and the U.S. President have worked out the framework of a deal to lower the Federal deficit by slashing certain kinds of spending while doing nothing to increase revenue by taxing corporations or the rich.
Economist Paul Krugman calls the deal a “disaster” which “amounts to an abject surrender on the part of the president” to “raw extortion”, and wonders why Obama didn’t utilize any of the tools he had at his disposal to avoid this “catastrophe”.
The Young Turks Cenk Uygur, recently ushered from the insider’s club for his insufficiently partisan critical stance, remembers how President Clinton was able to avoid a debt ceiling challenge from Gingrich republicans in his day. Why didn’t Obama use this or any of the other available methods to avoid a similar challenge now?
Constitutional Lawyer cum Journalist G. Greenwald isn’t buying the myth of Obama’s weakness, and points to the president’s own pronouncements and actions to argue that brutal cuts to Social Security and Medicare is precisely what the corporatist Obama want.
The whole debt ceiling debate has been a political show — a display of tooth and nail fighting between parties that agree on fundamentals:
Ballooning war spending? Significant cuts are off the table.
Taxing corporations the rich? Don’t hold your breath.
In a DN interview, Economist Richard Wolf puts the debt agreement disaster in historical perspective:
In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.
So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.
Even worse this not-so-sleight-of-hand robbery comes at a time when globalizing corporations are achieving liberty from any merely national interests — expanding overseas and laying off domestic labor.
The Associated Press reports that “strong second-quarter earnings from McDonald’s, General Electric and Caterpillar on Friday are just the latest proof that booming profits have allowed Corporate America to leave the Great Recession far behind.”
Again Richard Wolf traces the historical trajectory:
You know, 30, 40 years ago, we spoke about corporations moving production jobs out of the United States. Ten or 15 years ago, we began to talk about outsourcing, moving white-collar jobs out. The most recent addition to that is the decision of corporations, as they look around the world, to say, you know, the growth of our market, the growth of demand, it’s in Asia, it’s in Latin America, it’s in parts of—it’s not here. The American people are exhausted. Their wages are going nowhere. We have high unemployment. And the fact is, no one is going to lend them much more money because they’re tapped out. So they’re not a growing market. So you see American corporations literally focused, for production and for consumption, elsewhere. That means they’re going to take care of themselves in the world.
Power industries have resorted to extreme measures in order to produce energy for an insatiable civilization, exploiting increasingly remote crevices of the planet in the pursuit of corporate profit — without regard to heavy environmental costs.
Below are three examples: oil from tar sands, coal from mountaintop removal, and nukes from a demonstrably unsafe and under-regulated industry.
Tom Radford’s documentary film about oil extraction from Alberta’s Tar Sands tells the story of Canada’s sorry environmental trajectory, its obstructionism to a global climate deal, the pollution of the Athabasca River and the devastating effects on the humans and other organisms in the area.
A choice sequence from the documentary:
Narrator: In Kyoto, Canada promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6%. Now, 20 years later, the tar sands are booming and the emissions are up 26%.
Bill McKibben: If you set out to devise a method to harm the planet, you couldn’t come up with a better one than what Canada is doing at the tar sands. You’ve got to bring in energy to heat this stuff up enough to get it out. Once you spent all that energy in getting it out, then you refine it into gasoline and burn it again. If any significant portion of that tar sands continues to get exploited and burnt, then we’ll simply have too much carbon in the atmosphere
Tim Flannery: For every barrel of oil that you get from the tar sands, you release three times the as much carbon that you get form a conventional oil well in Texas or Saudi Arabia. So there is a big carbon liability… if the world followed followed Canada down that route… we would cook the earth.
Recent development from Mother Jones, on the devastating health effects of mountaintop removal mining:
A new study linking Appalachian mountaintop removal mining to birth defects offers compelling new evidence of the practice’s impact on human health..
Researchers at Washington State University and WVU pored over nearly 2 million central Appalachia birth records from 1996 to 2003. Their findings are disturbing: Kids born near mountaintop mining operations suffered higher rates of a bevy of birth defects, including central nervous system, musculoskeletal, urogenital and circulatory and respiratory problems.
I’ve posted on mountaintop removal before, and described how it saves the coal industry labor costs by simply blowing up mountains to get to the coal deposits inside.
In the process, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Mining companies are clear cutting thousands of acres of some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests. They’re filling local rivers and streams with blasted debris, polluting drinking water with toxic waste and sacrificing the safety and sanctity of countless communities.
“The Last Mountain“, a critically acclaimed new documentary about mountaintop removal is playing in theaters this month. Here is a promotional trailer:
BTW, if you want to find your own electric connection to mountaintop removal, here is a useful tool.
Although the Fukushima disaster has largely disappeared from U.S. “news” media that prefer to giggle at pictures of pee-pees, al-Jazeera is probably right to assert that it is “much worse than you think“.
The article quotes a longtime high level nuke industry exec Arnold Gundersen who claims that “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.”
The disaster has led global support for nuclear power to subside, but in the U.S. the AP has reported on how “federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them.”
Meanwhile, these doctors are suggesting a connection between Fukushima and a 35% spike in infant mortality in the U.S. pacific northwest.
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.
The idea that the U.S./European intervention is motivated by humanitarian concerns appears plausible at first glance because Gaddafi was slaughtering protesters and openly threatening to slaughter more — so “intervention” could be sold as a humanitarian act.
But a bit of critical reflection on the wider context of this policy reveals how shallow such an explanation is.
First, there is the question of consistency. If the U.S. (et. al.) were motivated by humanitarian concern, then what of concern for the protesters being slaughtered in the streets of other autocratic states, like Syria, Yemen or Bahrain?
The White House managed to verbally condemn the crackdown in Syria, but the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, important assets in the imperial project, get a pass or even support – Secretary of State Clinton asserted that Yemen had the “sovereign right” to invite Saudi Arabian forces into the country to violently crush dissent.
And what about Israel? Siddharth Varadarajan asks the multi-billion dollar question:
Why does only Libya get attacked or referred to the International Criminal Court and not other countries? If there is one country in the Middle East which has threatened international peace and security for decades and which, even as these words are being written, has launched its air force, yet again, against a defenceless civilian population, it is Israel. Yet never have the cheerleaders for the war on Libya argued in favour of a mandatory no-fly zone to protect the Palestinian and Lebanese people from Israeli airstrikes.
This selective application of humanitarian intervention exposes it as a whitewash.
Furthermore, if concern for humanity was a motivating factor for the U.S. (et. al.), then what of concern for its own citizens? Writing in the NYT, Bob Herbert reminds us that this “humanitarian intervention” is also “pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war… while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.”
“Humanitarian Concern”, like “Spreading Democracy”, is a PR label cynically used to sell imperial military projects to a (still-too-naive) domestic market, as well to serve as cover for complicit (and equally cynical) international institutions.
So, too, is the use of the euphemistic term “no-fly zone”, which had some Arab League support until it turned out to mean the shock and awe of missile strikes to inaugurate more or less unbounded military action, with its own inevitable civilian casualties.
But if not concern for humanity, then what motivates the U.S.(et. al.) attack on Libya?
Well, there is always the geopolitics of a dwindling oil supply. Or profits for the military-industrial-complex, which over decades gets to provide weapons to both Gaddafi and the coalition forces attacking him.
Cha-ching.
Some source material links from The Juice Media:
This vid from Taiwan summarizes recent wikileaks-related events quite nicely:
