Two thirds of the way through the talk, they broaden the context to talk about the role of American companies in the war waged against privacy and free speech -- SmartFilter (now an Intel subsidiary, and a company that has a long history of censoring Boing Boing) is providing support for Iran's censorship efforts, for example. They talked about how Blue Coat and Cisco produce tools that aren't just used to censor, but to spy (all censorware also acts as surveillance technology) and how the spying directly leads to murder and rape and torture.
Then, they talked about the relationship between corporate networks and human rights abuses. Iran, China, and Syria, they say, lack the resources to run their own censorship and surveillance R&D projects, and on their own, they don't present enough of a market to prompt Cisco to spend millions to develop such a thing. But when a big company like Boeing decides to pay Cisco millions and millions of dollars to develop censorware to help it spy on its employees, the world's repressive governments get their R&D subsidized, and Cisco gets a product it can sell to them.
They concluded by talking about how Western governments' insistence on "lawful interception" back-doors in network equipment means that all the off-the-shelf network gear is readymade for spying, so, again, the Syrian secret police and the Iranian telcoms spies don't need to order custom technology that lets them spy on their people, because an American law, CALEA, made it mandatory that this technology be included in all the gear sold in the USA.
Here is the video of the talk which Doctorow attended given by Tor technologists:
It is depressing that US politicians pass laws that set up the basis for the spyware and then US corporations do the multi-million dollar R&D to develop the spyware that is then deployed by repressive regimes worldwide (plus the US government and big US corporations). We live in a "big brother" world. Orwell thought he was writing a cautionary tale with his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he was documenting the hellish future we now all live in.
Here is a good overview of the protests that are shaking the world and a prediction of more to come. The interview is with Gerald Celente.
My favourite phrase:
When the money on the top stops flowing down to the man on the street, the blood starts flowing in the streets.
While I don't agree with his specific "predictions" (he is no better than most other prognosticators), I do think he has the zeitgeist of the time correct: we are in an era of social upheaval because of a failing economic system with the root cause being a growing economic inequality and a growing marginalization of the bottom 50%.
Here is yet another Occupy demonstration where the police get aggressive...
The good news is that the police busy themselves ripping and shredding paper hearts instead of clubbing heads and pepper spraying demonstrators. I guess this is the new and improved "enhanced policing" to deal with outbreaks of democratic protests.
At least these isn't the Bush/Cheney "enhanced" interrogation techniques. There is some hope for the future.
The US is one of the few countries in the world where legal fictions have the rights of citizens and human being have "rights" only insofar they they don't try to exercise them. It is an Alice In Wonderland country.
A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats.
Such millionaires and billionaires aren’t contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.
Wall Street is punishing Democrats for enacting the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (weak as it is) by shifting its money to Republicans. The Koch brothers’ petrochemical empire has financed, among many other things, candidates who will vote against environmental protection.
This tsunami of big money into politics is the real public nuisance. It’s making it almost impossible for the voices of average Americans to be heard because most of us don’t have the dough to break through. By granting First Amendment rights to money and corporations, the First Amendment rights of the rest of us are being trampled on.
This is where the Occupiers come in. If there’s a core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy.
Yet when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard — in one of the few ways average people can still be heard — they’re told their First Amendment rights are limited.
The New York State Court of Appeals along with many mayors and other officials say Occupiers can picket — but they can’t encamp. Yet it’s the encampments themselves that have drawn media attention (along with the police efforts to remove them).
A bunch of people carrying pickets isn’t news. When it comes to making views known, picketing is no competition for big money .
Yet if Occupiers now shift tactics from passive resistance to violence, it would spell the end of the movement. The vast American middle class that now empathizes with the Occupiers would promptly desert them.
I may be wrong, but if you refuse to give political rights to people, then they will organize and seize those rights by bloody revolution. The words of Thomas Jefferson are prophetic: The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
I'm big on democracy. I'm one who thinks the Occupy XYZ groups should give up their tent cities and get involved in real politics with all their energy.
When thousands of Egyptian protesters took over Tahrir Square in events widely celebrated as the Arab Spring, I don’t recall anyone being concerned that they were violating local bylaws.
Of course, Egypt was a dictatorship and the only way to protest the lack of democracy was by breaking laws.
Canada isn’t a dictatorship, and so protesters — like the group now ordered evicted from St. James Park — don’t have the same clear moral licence to ignore bylaws that their Egyptian counterparts had.
Critics argue that the Toronto Occupiers have made their point; if they want to take it further, they should join a political party — attend all-candidates meetings, put up lawn signs, eat hot dogs at summer barbecues, become backroom operatives.
Of course, Occupiers should join political parties and try to change them. But part of the Occupiers’ point is that democracy has become a hollow shell.
In theory, democracy is one of humankind’s noblest creations — a system in which people govern themselves. In practice, the results have been, well, disappointing.
In particular, as the Occupiers note, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1 per cent undermines meaningful democracy, blocking the will of the bottom 99 per cent.
Or as the late 19th century Republican strategist Mark Hanna put it during another era of extreme inequality: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”
This is more obviously true in the U.S., but it’s also true here.
The financial elite manages to exert its dominance, not just at elections but at every stage of the political process — from the drafting of party platforms, the financing and organizing of political advocacy campaigns, the writing and amending of legislation, to the shaping of public opinion through the media (which they largely own). The wealthy are adept at influencing every stage of the broader political process.
Given the lopsided influence of the wealthy, those seeking to restore meaningful democracy and a more inclusive economic system can be forgiven for thinking it’s necessary to grab attention through extraordinary measures like occupying more than 1,000 parks across North America.
...
Rather than hanging out at malls or zoning out on Facebook, these young people have endured real hardship in the Canadian near-winter to fight for a more inclusive society. Any inconvenience they’ve caused through their peaceful occupation seems minor in comparison to their contribution to the public good.
As lawyers from the Law Union of Ontario point out: “Some inconveniences to local park users is a small price to pay for the larger price being paid by the 99 per cent worldwide in the face of an economic system that privileges the few over the many.”
Are occupations really necessary to draw attention to their cause? Perhaps not. But I’d trust their judgment over mine. After all, they’ve managed to change the public discourse, putting inequality front and centre — something activists and writers, myself included, have failed to accomplish despite decades of trying.
An article last week in the mainstream magazine New York notes that we’re now moving “from the terror era to the income-inequality era.”
Wow. After only two months, the Occupy movement — without backing from billionaires or governments — seems to have moved us into a new era. Not bad for a leaderless group that sleeps in tents and doesn’t even use microphones.
I'm hoping that the Occupy movement has moved us into a new era. But it isn't yet clear to me. I wish it were true. And hopefully it will be. But I still prefer my democracy via organized politics. I can accept a short term thrust to make political parties more accountable, but I don't want to think that "change" is only possible by street protest. I watched street protest in the 1960s and it didn't change anything. Real change is hard and it comes through an organized political effort.
The energy of the Occupy movement should continue demonstrations but its real heart needs to move into either creating a new political party or seizing an existing one and reshaping it to the needs of the 99%. Institutions can run the long race. Individuals out protesting on the street are, by nature, short term. Individuals need to get on with their lives. Get jobs. Raise families. You can't spend 20 years on the street carrying a sign. But a political party can spend 20 years building a following through educating the public.
It is going to take some bitter battles to put the top 1% back in a box and rein in the big corporations that have gotten used to "lobbying" to co-opt the government. The Progressive Era spent 30 years getting consumer protection laws passed and anti-trust laws passed and improved schools and raise the educational level of the public. Today there is just as much, if not more, that needs to be done in these areas plus rein in the income inequality (not through a Great Depression which came at the end of the Progressive Era). There is a lot of social change needed and it will be a long tough slog. The Occupy movement has set off a spark. But for it to be an enduring flame of hope and real change, it will need to be institutionalized.
Hopefully the American public learned a valuable lesson with the election of Barack Obama. You can't rely on politicians. You have to move politics up a notch and ensure that political platforms have teeth and that the politicians take an oath to uphold the platform with consequences if they fail to act in a "party spirit". More discipline is needed. The last 40 years of running on "faux political platforms" has to come to an end. People need to know what they are voting for. The era of "pretty faces" and charismatic leaders has to come to an end. A new era of institutions and commitment is needed.
I think Linda McQuaig puts too much emphasis on the momentary street struggle. She needs to look back over history and see that real change only comes when the "change" becomes institutionalized. Obama was able to put forward a false platform and then ignore 90% of his promises because there is no teeth in the Democractic party. The poor voters were sold a bill of goods. The new social movement needs to either form a new party with strong institutional structure or re-structure the Democratic party to put teeth into the platform with party discipline for its representatives. Not loyalty to a "leader", but a commitment to the party platform passed in the party convention.
Hopefully we are entering a new era. But I will believe it only when there is a political party with the discipline and structure to carry out the true democratic wishes of the electorate.
The ultra-rich don't like the bottom 99% "demonstrating". It is just too messy. Those 99% don't have a clear agenda. They don't have polished spokesmen who can step forth with a program.
The elite just don't like the messiness of "democracy". There are too many loose ends. It can't easily be controlled from one centre. So here is what the ultra-rich offer:
The rich like to leave running things to themselves. They have the money, so they can afford to buy the politicians, the police, the judges, the lawyers, the bureaucracy. The above video shows the elite of Egypt beating "good sense" into the heads of recalcitrant Egyptians, foolish people in the bottom 99% who don't understand that their "job" is to serve the rich. The military and police are simply on the street to remind the bottom 99% where their place is in society.
Why is democracy messy? Why does it take such a large amount of insult and injury to arouse the populace? Just look at what this woman will soon discover as she attempts to voice her viewpoint.
The state loves to tell you about your "rights" but don't you dare try to exercise them. People are smart enough to know that, so it takes a hell of a lot to arouse the populace. But when it gets outraged, it tends to take down not just the worst of the worst, but most of the worst and even a fair amount of the innocent. A social change is a messy affair. It is so much nicer to use the instruments of democracy to effect change, but when the elites refuse to listen, then you get blood in the streets.
Here is a Goldman Sachs partner taking on an activist/reporter in a debate on UK TV. It is interesting to watch this snake in a suit suavely manipulate the "discussion" to deliver all the same right wing talking points of the last 30 years and pretend that he has a revelation about wasteful "socialism". It was capitalism that crashed the system in 2008. And in Europe today, it is private banks who lent the trillions to governments that has created the latest global crisis. It wasn't people receiving pennies to feed themselves of the dollars to get medical care, the bits of money to find housing. It is the greed of bankers and the ultra-rich that has shut down the engine of growth and wants to impose even more "austerity" as they extract more and more from the bottom 99%.
I love the fact that this slimy Goldman Sachs suit claims that the protesters don't have "a clear agenda" and fail to have "spokesmen" to present a clearly laid out agenda. He pulls the big lie technique by claiming that the protests were "flaccid" and that their protests were over "trivial points". He obviously has never been hit by a truncheon or been gassed by police in riot suits. It takes somebody who hold more than "trivial concerns" and a "flaccid stance" to put up with police brutality and arrest. But this is the spin that the big bankers and ultra-rich want to put on it.
What this exposes is the great divide. These snakes in suits are used to quiet deals with money crossing hands to buy politicians and to buy "justice". The people in the street are used to working long hours, they are used to being lied to by politicians, and they have no clear method to get "heard" by the elites. So they go into the streets. This is messy. This is ugly. But if you can't buy the government, buy the police, buy the politicians, you are left with going into the street and getting your head cracked by a police baton. The bankers just can't understand this.
Obviously none of the lessons of the past have been learned. The police in America today carry out the same bullying and beatings and pepper-spraying. We are lucky that they haven't yet pulled a Ludlow Massacre where they set up the machine guns and then deliberately fire machine gun belt of bullets after machine gun belt. This is "justice" in America. This is the America where you have a "right" to free speech except when it is done in public or on the street or at an inconvenient time or in a manner that is considered "unsanitary" or "unsightly" by the powers that be.
And here's a bit from the UK... This is what you get when you protest there. This is a young girl's face after a "rubber bullet" has left its mark...
Here is a link to an outraged assistant professor of English, Nathan Brown, of the UC Davis faculty demanding the resignation of Katehi. It outlines the case against her for brutalizing the peaceful and legitimate protestors.
My personal view is that "ethical demonstrating" only works when those who have harmed you have a conscience and are moved by ethics. I'm not convinced that many of the elites have much of a conscience. I would like to think that they do, but I find precious little evidence of it. I find it profoundly sad that the bottom 99% have to take police abuse, beatings, and killings while those on top are only asked to "show regret" for their actions. Regret doesn't cut it for me. If Chancellor Katehi had any moral integrity, she would resign immediately and go about personally apologizing to the students of the university. Instead, the above video shows her walking past the powerless and not acknowledging them. Why should she? She is powerful. She is paid big bucks. She had a golden parachute. They are simply students who will suffer 10% unemployment when the graduate. They will be forced to "conform" to the dictates of an elitist society that believes that 0.1% should get 20% of the income and wealth of the society.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. led non-violent protests. They make great video and wonderful stories, but I remember the frustration of the youth of the 1960s in the pitiful "fruits" of a massive effort at attempting to change the powers that be. The Jim Crow laws disappeared slowly, but there were literally hundreds of deaths by truly wonderful and noble people. A sacrifice that wasn't shared by the vicious thugs who beat protesters or the brutal cops who turn dogs loose on them.
The only effective tool for change is democracy. The use of a ballot instead of a bullet. But sitting peacefully as a powerful person walks by doesn't strike me as an effective technique. I would have much preferred the crowd repeating "shame, shame, shame" or something more harsh that simply sitting and letting the symbol of power walk unmolested to her car. I suspect she laughed herself silly on the drive home in that car. She had just experiences the sharp end of Obama-style "change you can believe in". In short, a worthless, useless "peaceful" demonstration. That effort would be better spent organizing ordinary people to vote their interests in elections at all levels in society.
Glenn Greenwald’s post at Salon says this far better than I can, but I think there are undeniable conclusions one can draw from this incident. The main thing is that the frenzied dissolution of due process and individual rights that took place under George Bush’s watch, and continued uncorrected even when supposed liberal constitutional lawyer Barack Obama took office, has now come full circle and become an important element to the newer political controversy involving domestic corruption and economic injustice.
As Glenn points out, when we militarized our society in response to the global terrorist threat, we created a new psychological atmosphere in which the use of force and military technology became a favored method for dealing with dissent of any kind. As Glenn writes:
The U.S. Government — in the name of Terrorism — has aggressively para-militarized the nation’s domestic police forces by lavishing them with countless military-style weapons and other war-like technologies, training them in war-zone military tactics, and generally imposing a war mentality on them. Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil… It’s a very small step to go from supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one’s fellow citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non-violent political protesters.
Why is that such a small step? Because of the countless decisions we made in years past to undermine our own attitudes toward the rule of law and individual rights.
...
The UC Davis instant crystallized all of this in one horrifying image. Anyone who commits violence against a defenseless person is lost. And the powers that be in this country are lost. They’ve been going down this road for years now, and they no longer stand for anything.
All that tricked-up military gear, with that corny, faux-menacing, over-the-top Spaceballs stormtrooper look that police everywhere seem to favor more and more, it’s a symbol of the increasingly total lack of ideas behind all that force.
It was bad enough when we made police defend the use of torture and extrajudicial detention; now they’re being asked to defend mass theft, Lloyd Blankfein’s bailout-paid bonus, the principle of Angelo Mozilo not doing jail time.
How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the submachine guns, fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style. Maybe after work you can go break up a game of Duck-Duck-Goose at the local Chuck E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one.
Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple as that.
Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.
The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.
The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been “persuaded” — through fear and intimidation — to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.
...
Pervasive police abuses and intimidation tactics applied to peaceful protesters — pepper-spray, assault rifles, tasers, tear gas and the rest — not only harm their victims but also the relationship of the citizenry to the government and the set of core political rights. Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights.
Here is a bit from a talk entitled "With Liberty and Justice for Some" given by Glenn Greenwald that focuses on the abuse of Bradley Manning:
Pepper spray, which in many countries is defined as a weapon and is often illegal for civilians to possess, can cause tissue damage, respiratory attacks and, in rare cases, death. It is considered far superior during crowd control to more violent forms of self-defense. But, like Tasers, which can also cause severe injury and death, there is increasing concern than it is being used by law enforcement without discretion or proper understanding of its dangers. The UC-Davis video will only amplify those concerns.
The police officer emerges from the margins of the scene, walks in front of a line of students on the ground with arms interlaced, and brandishes the can briefly in a gesture that feels both bored and theatrical, like someone on a low-budget television commercial displaying a miracle product or a magician holding the flowers he is about make disappear. He then proceeds to spray a thick stream of orange liquid into their faces. The crowd surrounding the students erupts in cries of “shame, shame,” questioning the police about whom they are protecting.
The spraying is slow and deliberate, one face after another, down the line. It is the multiple victims that makes it so chilling, recalling the mechanization of violence during the 20th century. Pepper spray, of course, isn’t meant to be lethal, and it was deployed during an effort to enforce university policy rather than a state-sanctioned campaign of violence. But the apparent absence of empathy from the police officer, applying a toxic chemical to humans as if they were garden pests, is shocking. Even more so because it is a university police officer.
University police generally operate under a more benignly paternalistic understanding of the law than other police. They are there to ensure the safety of the students, to help with the messier details of the in loco parentis function of the university.
A half-century ago, many parents told their children to ask a cop for help in case of trouble. With police forces now defining their role as more military than civilian, viewing citizens with suspicion and often treating them with hostility, that has changed. Saying the wrong thing to a cop, asking for a warrant before a search, throwing a snowball at an unmarked cop car, legally taking a picture of an official building, questioning a Capitol police officer about why a public area has been closed can lead to threats of arrest, or worse. But on university campuses, the police are often seen as they generally once were: your friend.
The UC-Davis police force has defended the use of pepper spray. An independent police expert quoted by the Associated Press calls pepper spray a “compliance technique,” in language eerily reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s euphemisms for torture.
Even if it is determined that the police followed proper procedures, the video might have lasting power for outrage, tapping into growing concerns not that police are abusing standard policies, but that our policies might need to be revised. Indeed, the disjunction between how the UC-Davis police read this video (they see an officer doing his job) and how many others read this video (they see a man in a uniform causing great and unnecessary pain to unresisting students) indicates that we have reached a kind of intellectual impasse about what kind of police we want and what limits should be placed on their power.
...
UC-Davis has announced an investigation into the officer’s action and whether it was merited and legal. It is a familiar pattern — the video is uploaded, it spreads, outrage develops and then the institution issues a seemingly reluctant and reactive plea for caution. We don’t know the context. We don’t know what really happened.
That kind of caution grew out of an age of skepticism in response to the manipulation of photographs by unscrupulous agents, including totalitarian governments. It was an appropriate skepticism, engendering a valuable resistance to the extraordinary power of images to seem transparently truthful.
The times may be changing. Video can be as easily manipulated as photography, but multiple videos from multiple perspectives, arriving within hours or minutes after an event, require a different kind of skepticism. The repeated claims by officials that our eyes are lying begin to seem more and more incredible.
There are reports of the efficacy of capsaicin in crowd control, but little regarding trials of exposures. Perhaps this is because pepper spray is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, as a pesticide and not by the FDA.
The concentration of capsaicin in bear spray is 1-2%; it is 10-30% in “personal defense sprays.”
While the police might feel reassured by the study, “The effect of oleoresin capsicum “pepper” spray inhalation on respiratory function,” I was not. This study met the “gold standard” of clinical trials, in that it was a “randomized, cross-over controlled trial to assess the effect of Oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray inhalation on respiratory function by itself and combined with restraint.” However, while the OC exposure showed no ill effect, only 34 volunteers were exposed to only 1 sec of Cap-Stun 5.5% OC spray by inhalation “from 5 ft away as they might in the field setting (as recommended by both manufacturer and local police policies).”
By contrast, an ACLU report, “Pepper Spray Update: More Fatalities, More Questions” found, in just two years, 26 deaths after OC spraying, noting that death was more likely if the victim was also restrained. This translated to 1 death per 600 times police used spray. (The cause of death was not firmly linked to the OC). According to the ACLU, “an internal memorandum produced by the largest supplier of pepper spray to the California police and civilian markets” concludes that there may be serious risks with more than a 1 sec spray. A subsequent Department of Justice study examined another 63 deaths after pepper spray during arrests; the spray was felt to be a “contributing factor” in several.
A review in 1996 by the Division of Epidemiology of the NC DHHS and OSHA concluded that exposure to OC spray during police training constituted an unacceptable health risk.
Update 2011nov25: Here is an interview with Nathan Brown, professor of English at UC Davis, who has written a letter calling for chancellor Katehi to resign. He appears at 2:45 into the video:
Here is a useful insight by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic. It helps explain the success of the movement. It isn't a single idea, it is mechanism (in nerd terms an API, i.e. application programminf interface) that allows other groups to use aspects of other Occupy sites to build their own local version:
The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that's surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.
This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, "I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway." If you get the idea, go ahead and skip ahead to the documentation below. If you don't get, let me explain why it might be the most useful way of thinking about #Occupy.
...
What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).
...
So, here's your guide to the Occupy Wall Street API. I realize that this is not a realistic API, just a useful frame, but we employ, for verisimilitude, the REST architecture, just like Twitter. That means we only have a few actions: Get (retrieve info), Post (create or update info), Delete.
US police have gone after an 84 year-old-woman, arresting her, pepper spraying her, at an Occupy Seattle demonstration. This is "justice" in America...
It is incredible that the police would become violent just when the group was very publicly deciding to go home. It shows that the police are not "forced" into brutal behaviour. This is gratuitous brutality just to "prove" that the cops are "in control". This is what the top 1% want. They want to keep the bottom 99% scared and disorganized. So they intimidate and brutalize.
As everybody knows... it is the 84 year old grannies who are the real threat to America. Not the trillion dollar crimes of Wall Street that have created 25 million unemployed and 10 million families losing their homes.
It is interesting that she ties the violence and repression from on top with the kind of violent repression used by Nazi Germany. She's lived the politics and she can testify to reality on the ground. And as she points out, the media don't carry any stories about real popular protest. Big corporations can "buy" the news coverage they want. The poor and middle class have to fight via protests in the street to get any coverage.
I don't buy all the "issues" of the left and political activists, but most of the time they are speaking the truth. They need to be heard. Democracy is the only tool to achieve a true civil society in which all interests get represented fairly. A real civil society needs an uncorrupted politics and a free media and a citizenry who pay attention and get out to vote. This combination is hard to achieve. That is why democracy so often is dysfunctional. But ultimately democracy is the only political system that can assure a fair society. Anything else leads, in the long run, to repression and collapse.
Update 2011nov18: Here's a photo of the woman being helped after being pepper-sprayed:
Here is a new initiative by the Occupy movement that is a positive change. It is a fight to help those losing their houses and in this case they are out to help a police man hang on to his house...
This reminds me of the people during the Great Depression who came to auctions to stop the government from selling off a person's house or farm when the creditors foreclosed.
The government has decided that classroom professors are not getting "the message" across to students and have unleashed the police with batons to club and spear peacefully protesting students. This is a very important lesson about "power" in America:
The top 0.01% control the politicians, the courts, and the police. So when students don't respect the right of the rich to plunder the middle class and impoverish the poor, then a little "school lesson" is needed with billy clubs to "beat some sense" into students.
Sadly, that is America. Land of the "free to be beaten up". Gone are the days of free speech and the right to assemble. These are they days when you need to buy your political rights just like the billionaires have so successfully done.
For UC Berkeley graduate student Alex Barnard, the most disempowering moment of Wednesday night was not when he was repeatedly hit with a police baton, cracking one of his ribs. Instead, the most disturbing moment of his experience came afterward, when he says an officer told him he had “no rights.”
According to Barnard, who was arrested along 31 others as part of Wednesday night’s Occupy Cal demonstration, after he was handcuffed with a zip tie and taken into Sproul Hall, a police officer asked him for identifying information. Rather than immediately answering, Barnard said he asked the officer about his rights and when he would be allowed to speak to a lawyer. It was then that the officer told him he had no rights and, after Barnard disputed the statement, said he would be recorded as “uncooperative” on his police forms, according to Barnard.
“You didn’t have a voice,” Barnard said.
The experience described by Barnard and his fellow protesters’ violent treatment at the hands of the police — supported by video footage taken at the demonstration — has led to wide-spread condemnation of the police response. Critics ranging from campus student groups to members of the UC Berkeley faculty and even the national media have spoken out against the police officers’ use of force.
According to a campus-wide email sent by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and other top campus administrators, the campus Police Review Board will investigate whether police used excessive force given the circumstances.
I love it when the official have "an official investigation". It is just a way to bury the item. These students were assaulted by the police. No policeman was arrested for assault. The "investigation" will find "extenuating circumstances" and the whole thing will be buried. That is how the elites make sure that nobody rocks the boat. You have no rights. Sure you have lots of "paper" rights, but money in America owns all the "rights". Until the people change that, the standard of living in the US will continue to decline and the government will continue on its path to banana republic.
This decision is largely governed by practical, not philosophical, considerations. We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control. Our intention in sending out our message early was to alert everyone that these activities would not be permitted. We regret that, in spite of forewarnings, we encountered a situation where, to uphold our policy, we were required to forcibly remove tents and arrest people.
Allow me to retort: what they really mean is that the University of California is not, in fact, governed by “a philosophy,” but by the reverse: an active refusal to require a philosophy in justifying its choices. That way he can write that “UC Berkeley as an institution shares many of the highest principles associated with the OWS movement,” but also actively work in opposition to people’s attempts to put those principles into practice. This is an arbitrary line in the sand, drawn by an administration that is unflinchingly willing to use whatever means necessary to maintain their ability to draw arbitrary lines. Your philosophy is not wanted here, they are saying; in the name of practical considerations — which they define — you will be governed by government. And so the fact that students are trying to “democratize the regents,” as a popular chant puts it, is exactly the threat. A sentence like this one:
We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control.
is just another way of saying that when “intransigent” individuals refuse to acknowledge the university’s authority, the administration won’t be able to exercise its authority, so it will therefore need to exercise its authority. This is exactly as tautological and contradictory a line of “reasoning” as it sounds, a rhetorical snake eating its own tail. To maintain hygiene, the students cannot use tents to keep themselves warm; to manage the space, students must be kept out; to address “conflict issues,” students had to be attacked; and to keep the students safe, they will be beaten.
The language falls apart at this point, because it’s not “philosophy” that’s driving any of this, but the question of who has the right to speak and be heard about what the university is for. Which is why the next paragraph truly descends into absurdity, the one where you realize you are not dealing with an educator, but with a university Ministry of Truth:
It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.
What he describes — occupying space in a way that nonviolently prevents the police from doing what they want — is actually the very definition of “non-violent civil disobedience.” On the one hand, it is utterly non-violent: linking arms and holding on to each other as the police try to knock you apart is not “violent” but is precisely the opposite. It is the endurance of violence. And second, it is civil disobedience, again, precisely by definition. They were disobeying civil authorities, obeying the authority of their own consciences and solidarity instead
I want to skim past this sentence on to the next part, however which is in some ways the most remarkable part: he argues that the “tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” which deserves honor, is a tradition of obedience to civil authorities. He says that “we honor” those who do not obstruct the administration’s decisions, and that those who are “acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience” are, it turns out, those who obey authority.
This is not even ideology. This is simply nonsense. UCI professor Rei Terada has a great piece on what the administrator’s language might mean, but for me the important point to make is a much simpler one: they aren’t defending what they did — which would require admitting what they did — but only obfuscating it in language so bad that I can’t decide whether to call it vapid or actively dishonest. “Civil Disobedience” has always been, manifestly and unmistakably, a tradition of disobeying the civil authorities. I feel silly even needing to spell that out. And I feel embarrassed to work as an educator in the employ of anyone who would stand behind such specious stupidity. Linking arms and occupying the space between the police and their objective is a tactic used by just about every example of civil disobedience I can think of. It is, quite frankly the single best and most iconic example of the thing he says it is not. He is chewing up these words until they have become meaningless. Calling this language “Orwellian” is not hyperbole or exaggeration.
If he wants, Chancellor Birgeneau can approve of what the police did on Wednesday. If he wants to believe and argue that it is justifiable to try to break the bodies of students in hope of breaking their spirits, then let him believe it and argue it and then try to justify it. Let him tell us that when students put up tents on Sproul Plaza, the police will beat them until they take those tents down. Let him declare forthrightly that when students stand on grass at the wrong time and place — a time that is subject to the capricious and arbitrary decrees of the police and those who call them in — the administration believes its authority and responsibility is to beat them until they comply.
They have not said this. Birgeneau and his executive administrators are hiding behind meaningless language rather than talk openly and honestly about what everyone who was there or has seen those videos knows to be true: the UC will hurt you if you obstruct them or challenge their authority, even nonviolently. Free speech is a function of free thinking, and on the campus of free speech, Birgeneau should be free to say and think what he pleases, even if what he says is that those who do not obey will be beaten into submission. But let us hear him say that, if that’s what he believes. Let him admit and stand behind the decision he has made.
A former U.S. Army Ranger and Occupy Oakland protester was in intensive care on Friday after a veterans group said he was beaten by police during clashes with demonstrators this week.
The veteran, identified as Kayvan Sabeghi, was the second former American serviceman during the past two weeks to be badly hurt in confrontations between anti-Wall Street protesters and police in Oakland.
The group Iraq Veterans Against the War said Sabeghi was detained during disturbances that erupted late on Wednesday in downtown Oakland and was charged with resisting arrest and remaining present at the place of a riot.
Highland General Hospital confirmed that Sabeghi was a patient in the intensive care unit there.
Brian Kelly, who co-owns a brew pub with Sabeghi, said his business partner served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Sabeghi told him he was arrested and beaten by a group of policemen as he was leaving the protest to go home.
"He told me he was in the hospital with a lacerated spleen and that the cops had jumped him," Kelly said. "They put him in jail, and he told them he was injured, and they denied him medical treatment for about 18 hours."
The Oakland Police Department did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Sabeghi's name was listed by the Alameda County Sheriff's Office as one of more than 100 people arrested that night.
The veterans group said in a statement that police struck Sabeghi with nightsticks on his hands, shoulders, ribs and back, and that in addition to a lacerated spleen he suffered from internal bleeding.
Clashes between police and demonstrators broke out in the early morning hours of Thursday in downtown Oakland following a day of mostly peaceful rallies and marches citywide against economic inequality and police brutality.
The Port of Oakland was forced to shut down during those demonstrations, sparked in part by the severe injury of another former serviceman, ex-Marine Scott Olsen, during a confrontation with police last week.
Olsen's injury became a rallying cry for the anti-Wall Street protest movement nationwide.
When crazies start to trash things, all honest protesters should immediately leave the scene and desist from protesting to give police free rein to go after the violent idiots who are intent on trashing things and not on legitimate protest. But police have got to stop illegally attacking honest protesters and beating them to within an inch of death. Those police officers need to be identified and charged with attempted murder.
Social change is ugly. The only truly successful technique requires determination and patience. You have to push for change and not be tempted by violence of idiotic "press coverage". The media will distort the message and tempt you into short-cutting the process of education and legitimate social change. The media wants to see the "protest" as a product. They have no interest in real change. So honest and dedicated demonstrators have to ignore the lure of the press and "instant fame". Real change is anonymous and done one-by-one. The glory hounds and the self-appointed "leaders" are mostly sociopaths interested in manipulating things for their benefit. You have to avoid them. You have to find like-minded friends who will join in for the long haul.
The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.
The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.
The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.
Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.
But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.
Have your eyes already glazed over?
Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit.
President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.
Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.
The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.
The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.
I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.
Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.
Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy – 1968 and 1989?
I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.
Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.
The most interesting thing about the future is that nobody really knows what it holds. I certainly hope the 40 year swing of the pendulum to the right is about to be changed and society will swing back toward social justice, greater democracy, a better sharing of the fruits of economic development, and a more positive future for the bottom 99%. But this will only be clear 10 or 20 years from now.
Americans love to tell themselves that they are a "middle class" society. But as Paul Krugman points out in his latest NY Times op-ed column, that is no longer true of the US. The US is more of a pyramid with a tiny elite milking the rest of society for all the growth in income and wealth:
The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.
If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.
Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.
But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.
The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?
Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are helping to break the illusion and the political paralysis. It finally looks like the pendulum will stop swinging to the right to make the rich ever richer with more "tax cuts" and other sweetheart deals at the expense of the bottom 99.9%.
A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing.
As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America.
Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news – it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s.
But it’s the first time such news made the front page of the nation’s major newspapers.
Why? Because for the first time in more than half a century, a broad cross-section of the American public is talking about the concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.
Score a big one for the Occupiers.
Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.
A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.
I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a “class warrior.” Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.
And they blame Republicans for stacking the deck in favor of the rich. In that New York Times/CBS News poll, 69 percent of respondents said Republican policies favor the rich (28 percent said the same of Obama’s policies).
I sure hope this signifies a sea change in American politics. The pendulum has swung too long and too far to the side of the elites and against the "ordinary people". It is time to redress the inequality and injustice.
The old view was also that great wealth trickled downward – that the rich made investments in jobs and growth that benefitted all of us. So even if we doubted we’d be wealthy, we still gained from the fortunes made by a few.
But that view, too, has lost its sheen. Nothing has trickled down. The rich have become far richer over the last three decades but the rest of us haven’t. In fact, median incomes are dropping.
Wall Street moguls are doing better than ever – after having been bailed out by the rest of us. But the rest of us are doing worse. CEOs are hauling in more than 300 times the pay of average workers (up from 40 times the pay only three decades ago), as average workers lose jobs, wages, and benefits.
Instead of investing in jobs and growth, the super rich are putting their money into gold or Treasury bills, or investing it in Brazil or South Asia or anywhere else it can reap the highest return.
Meanwhile, it’s dawning on Americans that in the real economy (as opposed to the financial one) our spending is vital. And without enough jobs or wages, that spending is drying up.
The economy is in trouble because so much income and wealth have been going to the top that the rest us no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services we would produce at or near full employment.
Hopefully the new view is that "it takes a village to raise a child" so there will be more emphasis on education and job training, on fair wages and a minimum wage, and on social services for those who are falling behind through no fault of their own. The bottom 99% need to be re-booted so they can compete and get their fair share of the wealth of the society. The funny thing is: if you do this everybody prospers! But showering special deals and tax breaks on the rich impoverishes the bottom 99% and destroys the broader society.
In theory the police are agents of the people, their job is to "serve and protect" their community. But for some, the rogue elements among the police, those with a pathological thuggish personality, this becomes a "license to kill". Here is an example:
And this:
Sadly, the police argue that this was "justified force" and the responsible thugs were given only the lightest of wrist slaps. Why?
The violence of white collar crime, the Wall Street banks have thrown 25 million people out of work and foreclosed on 10 million home owners as part of a fraudulent crime spree. The violence of these perpetrators has not resulted in a single arrest or the thuggish police assaulting any of the "suits" of Wall Street. But if you stand in the streets to protest that your country has gone off the rails and that authorities are not doing their sworn duty to uphold the law, you are pepper sprayed and targeted by canisters of exploding tear gas. Go figure.
Olbermann starts out by praising Mayor Jean Quan's previous service to Oakland. It is an impressive list. But then he gets down to the horror that she unleashed by turning her police loose on peaceful protesters and makes it utterly, utterly clear the crime she has perpetrated by her actions. You must watch this video:
If you've been following the mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests, odds are that you've heard about events at Occupy Oakland. What you can't tell from the news clips is how the situation has played out for those of us who live here. I can't speak for everyone, but I do know that my reaction, both to the protestors and to the violent police interventions against them, is hardly an uncommon one.
...
The vibe where I was standing was tense. Occasionally an individual shouted at the arrayed police, “This is America! What are you doing here?” Or, “I can't believe you're doing this! We love you guys but what you're doing is wrong!” I didn't think it was a great idea to shout at the (silent but intent) array of police—it wasn't likely they were going to suddenly relent, and I knew they had been wearing heavy riot gear and carrying weapons (including astonishingly large batons) for six or more hours. My instinct was that it was not particularly safe to shout at tired men and women with weapons, no matter how righteous one's outrage is.
...
One guy passing me on the way downtown warned about tear gas. I spotted New York Times reporter Malia Wollan talking into her mobile—as she walked past I heard her describing the apparent effects of the gas on individuals exposed to it. Her account is available here.
Of the people headed toward me, I first thought a disproportionate number were bicyclists—only a few minutes later did I realize, embarrassingly, that there were other reasons for wearing a bicycle helmet that night. The tension in the crowd was palpably building so I decided it was time to head home. Keeping my distance turned out to have been wise, because this is what I missed getting caught up in:
I was also standing 50-100 feet south from where a police officer appears to have thrown a flash grenade into a crowd of people gathered to help 24-year-old Scott Olsen, who suffered massive head injuries after allegedly being struck by a tear gas canister.
I confess that it breaks my heart to watch this clip. If I had seen someone collapsed in the street, I'd have tried to help that person too. These people were apparently punished for their impulse to help.
...
I don’t know how to interpret everything I saw, and I can’t state with any authority what Occupy Oakland or any of the other protests ultimately mean. But I do know this: The millions of dollars California just spent on this crackdown did nothing to dispel or discourage the protestors. In fact, the police intervention has echoed around the world. Occupy Wall Street committed to sending $20,000 to Occupy Oakland and protestors as far away as Tahrir Square in Egypt have expressed their solidarity with the Oakland protestors.
History tends to happen when you least expect it, and my new neighbors have taken their first steps into its pages.
But the police forces’ violent tactics worked only temporarily, and have, for the moment at least, handed the Occupy movement a moral and political victory so big that not even Occupy protestors seem to recognize it.
The nation, and even much of the world, seemed to recoil in shock from the images coming out of Oakland Tuesday night, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse unarmed protestors, who built a camp in the city as part of the nationwide protest against an unfair political and economic system.
Critically wounded Marine veteran Scott Olsen became a rallying point for Occupy, following widely seen footage of protestors trying to carry him to safety in the midst of a tear gas assault. There were other pictures and videos: streets littered with rubber bullets, people in wheelchairs trapped in the tear gas, and bloodied faces and bruised bodies of unarmed protestors.
On Wednesday, OccupyOakland’s fortunes reversed.
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan announced that people could reoccupy Frank Ogawa plaza, renamed Oscar Grant plaza by the occupiers in honor of a black Oakland man shot to death by transit police in 2009. When people arrived for the General Assembly, the occupation’s standard open meeting, the grassy area of the plaza was fenced off. But through the course of the evening, and not without violent conflict among the occupiers, the fences came down.
People fought each other over the fences, pulling at each other, some linking arms to protect the fence, and screaming, all while the GA went on in the distance. Despite the fears of those attempting to protect the fence, no police moved in after it went down. The GA proceeded through the evening undisturbed by anything but news choppers overhead and a turn-out too big for the sound system to cover.
But word came in that an attack was imminent on OccupySF across the bay, and a large contingent moved to get on the BART transit to join San Francisco’s Occupiers in Justin Herman Plaza. But when they arrived at the station they found it closed; BART wasn’t letting the occupation on in Oakland, or letting people off at Embarcadero, the station closest to OccupySF.
The roused crowd took to the streets, marching down Broadway towards the police station. They met no resistance. The police stayed a block away on all sides, and melted back in front of the path of the crowd, directing traffic away from the protestor-filled streets of Downtown Oakland. Many protestors were looking for a confrontation with police, but found none — staying peaceful and well behaved, if boisterous and peripatetic. The only property damage I observed were a couple incidents of graffiti-tagging, of which only one was definitely attributable to the OccupyOakland march. There were no broken windows or even overturned trash bins, and police stayed largely out of sight for the evening.
...
During the slow, tweeted protestor pursuit of police, OccupySF drilled for a police raid, practicing locking arms around their camp and removing vital gear from the site. As the hours wore on, many tired occupiers became paranoid, and every bus or van that went by startled people and sent them into conspiratorial speculations. Some occupiers went around writing the National Lawyer’s guild phone number on the arms of occupiers who didn’t already have a lawyer.
Five members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, several running for mayor, arrived and used the people’s mic to address the occupiers. They stayed put for hours, and many occupiers credited them for preventing the police raid.
On Thursday, the SFPD stretched credulity by telling ABC Channel 7 that the whole thing was a training exercise, resulting in a sarcastic local news report regarding the whole event. At the same time, OccupySF posted a picture of a notice given to businesses around the occupation warning of “…increased activity by the SFPD in the immediate vicinity of One Market Plaza starting around this evening’s commute.”
In Oakland the occupation was returning Thursday, growing from one tent in the reclaimed area Wednesday night to eight tents. OccupyOakland is rebuilding against the background of a campaign to recall Mayor Quan, calls for OPD to be disciplined, solidarity marches around the country and the world, and the New York City GA’s consensus to devote 100 sleeping bags and $20,000 for legal and medical expenses to OccupyOakland.
...
Sheamus Collins, a bartender from Dublin, showed off his rubber bullet wound.
Click to Enlarge
...
No one seemed aware of how crushing their political victory in the last 24 hours had really been.
