Reportback from #J20

From an anonymous friend...


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This narrative of January 20th 2012 mostly follows the big sound bus brought by the Occupy Oakland Reclaim the Streets party. It ends during the building takeover, so there's more to the story if someone wants to add.

The morning's actions began before the sun came up, but not before the rain. Bechtel was quickly militarized (pun intended) with barricades and security guards, but people had already managed to get inside and squat the lobby. There were banks locked down or shut down all over the financial district. The sound bus gathered people and energy until the first Reclaim the Streets. It snaked around, visiting and supporting each lockdown or action and brought the music, dancing, and other ruckus with it. Bechtel was the first stop; shaking collective asses, blocking traffic to one of the world's most insidious military industrial leaders seemed to set a tone for the RtS. There was a move-in house party in front of Citibank to oppose foreclosures that included a Christmas tree, couch and TV. Code Pink was outside of Goldman Sachs with a person-sized squid to call attention to GS's slimy and sucky business dealings.

The intersection of California and Montgomery became a very important place at which to continue causing trouble all day long. Wells Fargo on one side with badass queer folks locked down and Bank of America on the other side with more lockdowns made it an ideal spot to park the bus and party and block traffic. When the police spastically arrested one person and the crowd surrounded them, many more cops showed up and the bus moved on.

Back at the Bank of America one block from B. Manning Plaza (aka Justin Herman) some folks had renamed BofA the “People's Food Bank of America” and served some delicious food to anyone walking by hungry. The bus crew was happy to partake when they arrived back at Embarcadero in time for the noon march.

The noon march was led by folks against ICE and was more regulated, but it in some ways it resembled the RtS. Although there were the ubiquitous orange-vest-people keeping the march on one side of the street, it also went to visit and support other actions before it arrived at ICE. Once ICE had been shut down, the march more or less dispersed and the RtS continued where the march left off (but without orange-vest-people of course.) Back to California and Montgomery, where the cops cut off the bus so it couldn't park again in front of the lockdown. There was one more stop before meeting up with the big evening march at BM Plaza. Unite Here Local 2 was picketing outside the Hyatt by Union Square. The union folks seemed a little less excited about being innundated with clowns, jugglers and other miscreants than the other actions, but when some bus folk joined the picket they got more into it. Suddenly it became apparent that the fountain outside the hotel had been filled with soap, because bubbles started flying in the wind, covering anyone in their path.


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Real trouble started right before the bus was about to leave the Hyatt. One especially friendly officer threatened the bus driver with 15 points on his driving record and suggested that he take the bus and leave town, though in different words. With threats still fresh, the bus left without the RtS and they marched back to BM Plaza. About 15 minutes before the march started, word went around that the bus was pulled over for something having to do with the taillight. About 50 people ran over to support, but were surprised to see the whole march come up the street and surround the bus and all the cops on the scene chanting “Whose bus? Our bus!” and “Cops go home!” 10 or so minutes later, the cops let the bus leave. Not sure exactly the end of the bus story, whether it got back to Oakland or not, but hope to find out soon.

The building occupation crew waited for a while at their meetup spot for the rest of the big march to arrive. They double-checked their banners and some masked up for the action ahead. Spirits were rowdy and high on the way to the building. The anti-capitalist bloc shouted at the police riding their motorcycles on the sidewalk and prevented cars from driving through the crowd. The building itself was huge – really, really huge. It was unbelievable at first that it could be empty. There were already police barricades set up, but the march was told that there were already occupiers inside. The cops started forming lines on either side of the block filled with people, and the fear of a kettle situation was real. Folks started walking down the block, and surprise! The Bentley dealership got its windows smashed by a couple of people. After an announcement that people were inside and wanted support, the march turned back toward the building.



However, this author did not. If anyone knows the rest of the story, please contribute!

Occupying Education: The Student Fight Against Austerity in California

[from the November/December 2011 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas; download the PDF version here]


(photo by Andrew Stern)

By Zachary Levenson

On November 18, University of California (UC), Davis police attempted to raid a student occupation on the campus. When a line of UC Davis students refused to move out of the way, Lieutenant John Pike covered their faces with military-grade pepper spray. He returned for a second round, making sure to coat everyone’s eyes and throats.

“When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood,” described Assistant Professor of English at UC Davis Nathan Brown.[1]

Within 24 hours, a video of the incident had gone viral on YouTube, and the media feigned outrage. UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi apologized for the incident, and UC president Mark Yudof announced a task force to address the police violence. UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau was also forced to apologize after campus police clubbed UC Berkeley students and faculty while they also nonviolently defended an encampment on their campus two weeks before.

This is hardly the first time that California students have faced brutal police repression in recent years. This sort of authorized police violence has been a constant feature of campus administrations’ response to students as they have continuously mobilized against the privatization of their public universities over the past two years.


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Early in the morning of November 20, 2009, 43 students from the UC Berkeley occupied Wheeler Hall, the building with the most classrooms on campus. When police arrived a couple of hours before classes began for the day, they found the doors barricaded and a small contingent of supporters gathered outside. Within a few hours campus unions were picketing, and students and workers had surrounded the building, chanting in solidarity. By midday, the number of supporters outside Wheeler Hall had grown to over 2,000, now actively defending the occupation in an impassioned standoff with hundreds of riot cops sent in to enforce order. Hanging from a second floor window was a spray-painted banner reading, “32% HIKE, 1900 LAYOFFS,” and the word “CLASS,” circled with a line through it. Purportedly in response to state funding retrenchment, the UC Regents had approved a 32% tuition hike for UC students across the state the day before. Students were livid.

In fall 2009, across the state, students launched dozens of occupations, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and blockades against the tuition hike and austerity measures. The police responded with repression, using batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and even Tasers. During the Wheeler Hall occupation demonstrations, one student was shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet at point-blank range, another ended up in the hospital after her fingers were nearly amputated by a police baton, and dozens reported being beaten.

“Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops,” read a graduate student nearly two weeks later, standing atop a chair, at a forum organized by the UC student government in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Police Department (UCPD). “The privatization of the UC system and the impoverishment of student life, the UC administration’s conscious choice to shift its burden of debt onto the backs of its students—these can be maintained only by way of police batons, Tasers, barricades and pepper spray. These are two faces of the same thing.”[2]

When he finished reading the statement, the students rose to their feet and followed him out of the room.

Oakland Book Bloc Strikes Again

On OWS, and what it means to 'make connections'

The following statement in support of the wall street occupation is currently circulating amongst UC faculty. At the moment, it has more than 600 signatures:

We, members of the faculty of the University of California, write in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere. Many observers claim that the movement has no specific goals; this is not our understanding. The movement aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few.

The demonstrators are demanding substantive change that redresses the many inequitable features of our society, which have been exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2009 and the subsequent recession. Among these are: the lack of accountability on the part of the bankers and Wall Street firms that drove the economy to disaster; rising economic inequality in the United States; the intimate relationship between the corporate power and government at all levels, which has made genuine change impossible; the need for dramatic action to provide employment for the jobless and protect programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in part by requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes; and the disastrous effects of the costly wars that the United States has been conducting.

Only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe. It is this identification that we applaud, and we call on all members of the University of California community to lend their support to the peaceful and potentially transformative movement.

A question this statement raises, and partially addresses, is how the occupy wall street movement could give way to large-scale social transformations. The petition suggests that a commitment to make connections between particular moments of social antagonism is a precondition of such transformative force, and it commends the wall street protesters for "identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes."

This seems right to me, as far as it goes (even if it's perhaps overly-optimistic about the politics of many OWS encampments). But we'd want to ask what the signatories and authors of this statement mean by "making connections." Is this merely a matter of slogans and speeches (i.e. the relatively public and programmatic acts of speech and writing associated with the movement)? Or does it also involve connecting the bodies and psyches of those fighting different forms of oppression, those caught up in previously discrete spheres of antagonism? Does it mean, for instance, enabling students to recognize their ties to those engaged in exploitative service/care work, and to realize forms of mutual solidarity with such workers? Or might it mean taking inspiration from dock workers who've often acted against police violence, mass incarceration, and the colonial occupation of Palestine?

It's worth proposing then a slightly expanded account of what it would take, in our moment, for the wall street protests to give way to large-scale, emancipatory transformations.

Three preconditions for such transformations are: the spread of Wall Street-style plaza occupations to new locations; the linking up of such occupations with mass strikes, seizures, and mutual aid efforts carried out across a range of social sites, including universities and other workplaces; and the undoing of repressive state forces. Not only are these preconditions for broader, emancipatory transformations, but also for the survival of the occupy wall street movement itself. As we saw this week, city and state governments will temporarily call off their armed agents only if they are afraid of an intensification and expansion of plaza occupations.

If stasis sets in, the state will move against us.

Cops, Or, This Morning at Occupy Wall Street

If, after everything that's happened, you still think the cops are on your side, you will be the next one who gets punched in the face and run over by a motorcycle. Also, this:

Cops will detain you using whatever amount of physical violence they feel like using. It will almost always be wildly disproportionate to whatever crime they are alleging you have committed. (Remember, you don’t have to commit a crime for police to detain or arrest or hurt you. That is how police work. They will hurt you and detain you first, then allege a bunch of stuff later.) In a protest situation, where there are lots of cops and lots of people to be arrested, this any-means-necessary modus operandi is often intensified, cf. macing wildly into crowds, random batoning, etc.

Also, you don’t have to be “committing” a “crime” to be violently arrested and detained. It does not matter what you’re doing (just ask Oscar Grant). Cops make arrests because it is their job to make arrests: in New York it’s an open secret that quota systems are in place among mid-level police administrators, meaning that more arrests = job security. (Which side are cops on in the class war, btw?) You just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Police are accountable to basically no one, which makes unfounded arrests not only easy but necessary to the job description.

Whether cops are swinging and spraying into crowds or just hanging out on your block, it’s important to remember that your fourth, fifth and sixth* amendment rights are basically nil. You will not be told what you are being detained/arrested for. You should think of these rights with the same beleaguered cynicism with which you regard all liberal notions of subjecthood (or lol if you believe you have rights maybe you should just leave right now—go get arrested and report back, in fact), and the cop who abides by your constitutional rights to, say, know why you’re being detained or to be detained “without” excessive use of force as the exceptional cop, who goes above and beyond for reasons maybe having to do with your (yes your!) perceived socioeconomic status, or maybe just depending on the cop’s mood.

[...]

Basically, remember that police are allowed to have guns and whoever has guns can usually do whatever. Excessive use of force is what is regular for people who get arrested, as is the routine denial of constitutional rights to alleged criminals.

Oscar Grant Plaza

Invitation and Statement from the Oakland General Assembly

From the blog of the occupation:

To the people (aka the 99%):  Our only demand is an invitation: Join Us!

We are reclaiming public space to use as a forum for the people to come together, meet one another, listen to each other, and build power for ourselves.  Occupy Oakland is more than just a speak-out or a camp out.  The purpose of our gathering here is to plan actions, to mobilize real resistance, to defend ourselves from the economic and physical war that is being waged against our communities.

We look forward to making this occupation a space that is welcoming and inclusive of the diverse communities of Oakland (and the bay area).   We will acknowledge and learn from each other’s histories of struggle.  And we commit to challenging oppressive ideas, behaviors, and politics, even – or especially – when they come from ourselves or our comrades.

Oakland represent!

To the Politicians and the 1%:  This occupation is its own demand.

Since we don’t need permission to claim what is already ours, we do not have a list of demands to give you.  There is no specific thing you can do in order to make us “go away”.  And the last thing we want is for you to preserve your power, to reinforce your role as the ruling classes in our society.

It may not be obvious to you, but the decisions you make daily, as well as this system you are a part of, these things are not working for us.  Our goal is bring power back where it belongs, with the people, so we can fix what politicians and corporations have screwed up.

Stand aside!

To the Media: Our struggle won’t fit in a 15 second soundbite.

This occupation is a beginning, and we have a long way to go.  And while we have much in common, we believe the people are stronger united behind many banners, rather than a single one.   We want to make it very clear that Occupy Oakland is not putting forward leaders, tactical or strategic directives, or a uniform message or political platform.

- October 8th, 2011 Message from the Oakland General Assembly in preparation for Occupy Oakland!

Occupy Oakland Today

4pm. Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. 14th and Broadway. Be there.

More info here. Posters and images here. Read the OEA's endorsement here.

Everything You Need to Know About Occupy Oakland

Occupy Oakland will begin at 4 pm on Oct 10th, in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street and the dozens of other occupations taking place across US, as well as indigenous resistance day. A delegation from the Glen Cove encampment will be present at the opening of the occupation.

The organizers of this encampment want to link up Oakland with a growing social movement, but also adapt it to the realities and needs of our city with its rich and powerful political history.

There will be a final meeting to prepare for the occupation on Saturday, October 8 at 4pm in Mosswood Park.

For more information:

On the web: http://occupyoakland.wordpress.com/
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=290818544264175&ref=ts
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/occupyoakland

Download flyers and other propaganda here: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/10/07/18692504.php

Put It All In Pepper Spray

(pepper spray starts at about 20 seconds)

UPR Strike in Solidarity with #OccupyWallStreet

Musical Interlude in Solidarity with #OccupyWallStreet

Arm the Hungry

No mercy for bankster scum.

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Troy Davis Protesters meet Wall Street Protesters

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Troy Davis Protesters Occupy Wall Street
New America Media, News Feature, Ryan Devereaux,
Posted: Sep 24, 2011

NEW YORK CITY -- Less than twenty-four hours after the state of Georgia injected a cocktail of lethal drugs into the bloodstream of Troy Anthony Davis, the repercussions of his death hit the streets of New York City this Thursday with full force. A rally that was billed online as a “Day of Outrage,” lived up to the name as it snowballed into a massive impromptu march through lower Manhattan.

People young and old, of all classes and colors, joined hands in a moment of silence to honor a man whom many believed died for a crime he didn’t commit. Some cried, many chanted. With references to Jim Crow and legalized lynching, the collective indignation was palpable. There were impassioned monologues from anti-death penalty advocates, poets and people who simply found themselves moved by the moment.

With little warning, the crowd, numbering in the high hundreds, decided to march. The destination was unknown but the resolve was clear. The police did their best to keep up as the mass of mourners moved west down 14th Street, then south onto 5th Avenue.

Parents marched with children on their shoulders. Crust-punk activists joined demonstrators in pressed shirts, repeating the refrain, “The system is racist, they killed Troy Davis!” Wide-eyed Manhattanites poured out of restaurants and businesses, camera phones in hand, to capture what was unfolding.

As the number of marchers swelled it became evident that some of the spectators had transformed themselves into participants.

With steadily increasing numbers –some estimate over a thousand – and a phalanx of marching and scooter-mounted cops on its tail, the sea of demonstrators continued south. Word soon spread that the demonstration knew where it was headed: Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street

For the last week an encampment of protesters executing a campaign known as Occupy Wall Street have taken up residence at Trinity Place, a square roughly a thousand feet from the very heart of global capitalism. They’ve renamed the space Liberty Plaza, and targeted their frustration at a number of issues, including corporate greed and the unyielding influence of moneyed interests on the U.S. political system.

Illuminated by street lamps and police lights, the throng of Davis supporters was met with cheers and music provided by an estimated 500 Wall Street protesters. Within minutes dozens of NYPD officers were attempting to physically force scores of demonstrators onto a strip of cement already packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people.

Protester Brandon King, 27, found himself caught between the police and the crowd. With his back turned to the officers, King was yanked from the crowd and slammed into the pavement; arrested on charges of obstruction of governmental administration, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. King denies that he resisted, saying he went limp while officers punched him in the back.

His arms bleeding, he was dragged away as a demonstrator screamed, “The whole world is watching!” Indeed, there was no shortage of recording equipment documenting the moment.

One young man, in an apparent attempt to put the situation in context, cried out to the police, “These people are marching peacefully for a dead man!”

Joseph Jordan, 29, says he received similar treatment. He claims a senior police officer singled him out, saying “I’m sick of you.” A number of officers then piled on top of him, making it impossible to scream or breathe, he says.

“I feel that their immediate response to us was that, ‘We don’t care about your anger. We don’t care about your frustration. We don’t care about Troy,’” King said, following his release from jail the next day.

Despite the heavy-handed tactics of the police, the demonstrators remained resolute and non-violent. Their numbers inflated by the Liberty Plaza crowd, the group decided to continue the march to Wall Street itself.

A Surreal Scene

The shouts of the protesters, the rapid-fire tapping of a snare drum and the unavoidable presence of Federal Hall’s famous George Washington statue made for a surreal scene. What could have been a profound moment to reflect on democracy in action, turned ugly when a hulking police officer grabbed a young woman by the back of her neck, yanked her over a metal barrier and slammed her into the ground, her skull smacking against a curb.

A second officer then picked up Saman Waquad and tossed her back over the barricade where her back slammed into a cement stair. The crowd erupted in anger, chanting “Who do you protect?” over and over.

Waquad –who attended the Troy Davis rally after years of following his story– says that two officers were involved in grabbing and tossing her against the steps in front of the federal building.

“Honestly, I’m five feet tall and I weigh a hundred pounds. I don’t know at what point somebody thought that I would be a physical threat to a cop. All I was doing was taking pictures of them brutally grabbing somebody from the crowd,” the 28 year-old said.

“As somebody who lives in this country and pays taxes, I have the right to be able to peacefully protest an injustice,” she added.

An Emboldened Movement

Moments later, a senior NYPD police officer announced that anybody still on Wall Street after five minutes would be subject to arrest.

The protesters filed back in and suddenly the plaza –which has been criticized as the project of over-educated white kids– began to show signs of the diversity it has so sorely lacked.

The reaction of the NYPD Thursday night was predictably overzealous and needlessly violent. What wasn’t expected, however, was the spontaneous merger of two growing struggles. One group has taken to the streets out of frustration with an economic status-quo they say leaves too many with not enough. The other has voiced outrage over a so-called justice system that disproportionately targets, imprisons and kills people of color.

Both are struggles against marginalization. Both are refusing to remain silent.

They have now marched together, stood up to the police together and been arrested together. Such experiences can create formidable bonds. In its attempt to suppress popular dissent, the NYPD may have just emboldened a movement.

Ryan Devereaux is a Democracy Now! news production fellow and an independent journalist. Follow him on Twitter @RDevro


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Today in NY
Published 2011-09-25 12:11:29 UTC by OccupyWallSt

At least four arrested, one for shooting photos UPDATE: at least eighty arrested, five maced | RETRACTION: no tear gas used

We have at least four arrests today during a community march, a fifth arrest is suspected but police will not confirm.

A legal observer attempting to contact an arrested member was not allowed to due to “an emergency situation,” we are currently unsure of what this means. At least one arrest was due to a protester taking photographs. At least one protester's possessions have not been returned.

Please call the first precinct, central booking and the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information and urge them to release these peaceful protesters.

First precinct: +1 (212) 334-0611
Central booking: +1 (212) 374-3921
Deputy Commissioner of Public Information: +1 (646) 610-6700
NYPD Switchboard: 1-646-610-5000

UPDATE: We are now receiving reports that at least 80 protesters have been arrested. The National Lawyer's Guild puts the number at around one hundred. Liberty square is currently full with an ongoing discussion on how to respond to this unprecedented level of police aggression. Police are currently surrounding the square. There is nearly one police officer for every two protesters.

Earlier today we had reports of police kettling protesters with large orange net, using tasers, at least five protesters have been maced.

UPDATE: Some pictures http://twitpic.com/6pzd48
http://twitpic.com/6pzcf6
http://twitpic.com/6pzbxi
http://twitpic.com/6pza9z

Video: http://www.twitvid.com/ZCB5U

Wall Street Occupation, Day Three

September 19, 2011, 8:50 pm
Originally posted here.

Thousands gathered Saturday

a guest post by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Zuccotti Park in the Lower Manhattan financial district has been occupied by a politically diverse group for the last three days, with participation of up to several thousand at a time. Protesters have renamed the space “Liberty Park,” to brand it as an American counterpoint to Cairo’s Tahrir (“Liberation”) Square, and it has played host to general assemblies of thousands of people, hundreds of whom have slept in the park for the last two nights.

They hope to begin a sustained occupation to, in the words of two of the authors of the original call to action, “escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.”

Taking cues not only from the so-called Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Iran, and Syria, but also the Spanish indignados, and anti-cuts protestors in the UK, Greece, France, and Italy, as many as 5,000 protestors converged on Wall Street this past Saturday. A march Monday morning resulted in seven arrests.

That many of these protesters are or have been students should surprise few. Yet rather than dismiss their actions as youthful idealism, it’s important to understand the role students have played in the struggle against contemporary austerity politics.

Though the language of austerity measures is often promissory, gesturing towards an alternatingly apocalyptic future (which we must sacrifice now to avoid) or a bucolic future (which awaits us after austerity ‘rights the ship,’) many cuts have targeted youth, mortgaging that future or rendering it altogether absent.

The news last year that student debt has surpassed credit card debt as the largest source of consumer debt in the United States is a function of rising costs of attending higher education, cuts to state and federal financial aid, and the growth of for-profit private industry around the student loan bubble.

This summer’s debt-ceiling compromise included an end to subsidized loans for graduate students, and in a year, it will mean that graduate and professional students will have to pay back their undergraduate student loans while in grad school, a difficult proposition for many.

This occupation is not the first on U.S. soil in recent years, and it is unlikely to be the last.

Whether and how it can attract the levels of support and involvement that similar occupations have elsewhere is an open question, but even NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg sees in the present crisis the possibility of escalating student rebellions.

Washington Post photo gallery
International Business Times article (“several thousand protesters showed up in New York’s financial district”) photo gallery
Guardian op-ed (“The call to occupy Wall Street resonates around the world”)
DailyKos: Chris Bowers
xposted: howtheuniversityworks.com

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Meanwhile, at 55 Wall Street, the building's occupants stand around and on the balconies drinking champagne and um, playing the fiddle.