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.
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.
Nothing symbolizes more acutely the dark matrix of corporate hegemony, war, lies, unaccountability, torture and secrecy than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 8 years ago.
This weekend, as the U.S. Executive Branch (without Congressional approval) began bombarding yet another oil rich predominantly Muslim country, Los Angeles joined other cities in protest to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a “supreme international crime” according to principles laid out by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.
As I did last year, I documented the event in video. This year the most compelling speaker was Mike Prysner, an Iraq War Vet and co-founder of March Forward!, a anti-war veterans group. Here is a recording I made of his speech at the rally, edited with time lapse video of the protest march:
The AP reported that “hundreds” of people marched, but the time lapse sequences seem to indicate more. Looks like at least a few thousand to me.
Meanwhile, in D.C., Daniel Ellsberg and about 100 others were arrested in protests outside the White House.
In a discussion with Oliver Stone, Micheal Moore and Christopher Hedges, Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara “examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex”:
And here is another relevant quote from an older article by Normon Solomon on the same topic, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex“:
In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”
I never thought that I would see the day when Peter Tosh’s anthem would become a reality, but it looks like it might happen if enough people go to the polls tomorrow.
If anybody knows of any compelling reasons why marijauna should not be legalized, please let me know – I can’t find any.
By increasing the legality of this particular plant, CA Prop 19 would eliminate a disproportionately applied (i.e. racist) law that puts people in cages for the possession of a plant that grows from the earth. (Last year, CA police made 60,000 marijuana possession arrests, mostly of “young men of color”, even though “white” people use it more. )
Other benefits: It will increases tax revenue for a cash strapped state, and (possibly, hopefully) reduce the violence of the drug wars in Mexico, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.
But if all of this isn’t enough, just listen to Snoop:
No surprise, but Peter Tosh’s son Dave is also down. He makes his plea here.
Prop 23, initially and primarily funded by two Texas oil corporations (Valero and Tesoro), would suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) until unemployment drops to 5.5% for four quarters.
If it passes, Prop 23 will require that the State of California abandon the implementation of comprehensive greenhouse-gas-reduction program, and drop the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Proponents argue that the measure will help preserve jobs, and that preserving jobs should take precedence over addressing the climate crisis. Opponents say that overturning AB32 will result in more air pollution, undermine the burgeoning clean clean energy sector, and reduce incentives to find alternatives to oil. Also, there is mistrust of the motives of the measure’s sponsors, who happen to be among California’s worst polluters.
Here is an argument against Prop 23 in action-movie format, written and directed by respected acquaintance M. Cooke:
If Los Angeles has a future, it will include much more of this:
CicLAvia was the shit! Biking around the city without fearing for your life? No exhaust in your face and you can actually smell the trees!
I often imagine a car-free L.A., and this is the closest I’ve come to actually seeing it. It’s beautiful.
So great, that I am creating a new post category called “Solutions”.
Tuesday night’s blathering address from the Oval Office about the disaster in the Gulf has been widely panned for its timidity in the face of what could be the world’s worst ecological disaster - a disaster for which the President clearly bears some responsibility. And meanwhile Obama has just approved 400 new leases for oil companies to operate in the gulf.
Since it seems like people are starting to realize, finally and begrudgingly, that their boy is a pro-war, anti-civil libertarian, corporatist spokesliar, I’m starting to feel like there is less of an urgent need to propagate that particular piece of increasingly obvious information.
So I thought I’d turn attention to some locals who are doing it for themselves – and, unlike the federal government, successfully fighting to address our culture’s addiction to the vile substance at the heart of many of the world’s problems.
Several months ago, these “Caution: Please Pass With Care” signs started popping up all over L.A. They are the work of a group of guerrilla citizen-artists who call themselves the Department of D.Y.I. Here is a video of them walking the walk:
L.A. Streets Blog covered an earlier guerrilla campain by D.I.Y. here, andThe LA.ist published the group’s manifesto here. Their work can be seen all around the city:
Now it turns out that these guerrilla art campaigns – in conjunction with a sustained lobbying effort by the biking community — prepped the way for actual, official civic change: The LADOT has finally started to install “Sharrows,” which are an essential, although imperfect, piece of biking infrastructure.
Other things are afoot, as well: Only a few weeks after police harassment of a BP protest ride in Hollywood organized by Critical Mass, the L.A.P.D. is going to join Critical Mass as participants of a ride scheduled for June 25.
The la.ist hopes it is a game changer of cyclist/police relations in Los Angeles.
(BTW: If you are interested in following bike news, I recommend these feeds: Bike Commute News, L.A. Bike Coalition, L.A. Critical Mass, L.A. Streets Blog.)
Over the weekend the BP’s “Green Curve” gas station at Olympic and Robertson was once again the target of a collective protest, this time by a Critical Mass of Los Angeles bike riders.
After the demonstration, certain dickless piglets harassed the bike riders as they passed through Hollywood, and then tackled a videographer who caught an incident on tape:
WeHo Daily first covered the story here, the laist picked it up here, KPCC here. The LAPD met with an LA bicycle advisory committee yesterday to discuss the incident, which the LA.streets blog covers here.
Los Angeles Critical Mass has a twitter feed here, where you can get updates on the story and info about future rides, etc.
Meanwhile the ecocide in the gulf will continue to unfold over the next decades. Google has tool that can be used to compare the current size of the oil spill to the size of your own city. Here is ours:
