Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

One of the remarkable things about Occupy is how kind people are to each other. As I have at other protests here, I met many good and decent people with whom I had great conversations. Most of these people really care about the state of our world, and have embraced this movement with gratitude for having a place where they can figure out ways to take that caring and turn it into tangible action.

I point this out because no matter what the mainstream media says about Saturday’s action, there’s a big piece of the story that can only be absorbed by walking with these people and getting to know them. The heart of Occupy Oakland is so good. It’s been a bit broken by all the repressive police actions, ranging from waging war on the Occupiers the day of the first raid, to arresting people for things as petty as taking a blanket out of a garbage can. In spite of all the attempts to break the the movement’s heart and destroy it, it continues on, beating strongly and moving forward.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/29/occupy_oakland_open2012/singleton/

Why were they trying to occupy a vacant government building? Do they just think they have right to do whatever they want with everyone's property? I'm all about the message here, but don't know about stuff like this.

so I guess I'm sposed to go to WashSq by 7pm:

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/155073/medical-professionals-join-washington-square-demonstration

(not that I'm a med professional, except peripherally)

Why were they trying to occupy a vacant government building? Do they just think they have right to do whatever they want with everyone's property? I'm all about the message here, but don't know about stuff like this.

― Spectrum, Sunday, January 29, 2012 1:47 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dunno who's fault this is, it's probably complicated, but i feel like the message is getting lost on the mass-media level and "occupy" has come to = confrontations with cops, rather than issues of economic fairness.

i mean even in many of occupy folks' own write-ups it's like 90% about the confrontation and 10% about whatever they were there to protest.

Why were they trying to occupy a vacant government building? Do they just think they have right to do whatever they want with everyone's property? I'm all about the message here, but don't know about stuff like this.

as I understand it, the plan was to occupy a long vacant building owned by an absentee landlord and start a community center. so it's not a matter of "doing what they want with everyone's propert," tho that's a convenient generalization

"occupy" has come to = confrontations with cops

I was warning against this trend in the thread for airing our misgivings about OWS. A certain amount of this is unavoidable, because that confrontation will be thrust upon any large protest. What's dangerous is letting the movement be goaded into making this the new center of gravity the movement revolves around.

It is ridiculously easy to iniate the kind of street theater where the cops beat up on people. What's harder is showing the cops are actually beating up on a legitimate idea. That is where the value of organization, unanimity of purpose, and a clear strategy come forward.

The crop of youtubes from yesterday don't scan too well without context; it gave me the initial impression of a group of protesters facing off with a line of cops and agitating until they charged, When you read the stories, you realize they were corralled onto that street and then gassed and shock grenaded, at which point, yes, some people began throwing things back at them, and then they charged. The salon story is a must read; it was a trap. I've spoken to a few of my friends yesterday and a lot of them were randomly beaten by cops trooping through the crowds and side alleys, randomly - they'd take a few hits and then keep going, basically just to wind people up and raise the level of disorientation and panic. It was basically just a war zone, and it is horrifying to think even for a second that the fucking 'optics' on this one would land on the side of the OPD - hopefully they won't once more accounts go up

xp - yes - that 'legitimate idea' did not get through yesterday. There's Orwell's great quote about 'when I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask what side I'm on' - yesterday was unfortunately more complicated than that

But they shouldn't have been, because from what I'm hearing that is exactly once again what happened

Trying to takeover somebody's property, no matter how good their purpose, puts their message on the wrong side of things. If you're going to do illegal shit as a form of protest, at least make it a part of something absolutely necessary to what you're accomplishing. If they felt the property was being underutilized, there's a process for that. If the process fails, protest the process, etc. etc... and sometimes there's nothing you can do re: private property. It's like they went from Step 0 to Step 20 without thinking of the consequences.

Wrong for the cops to overreact, but it's hard to sympathize with unnecessary illegal action on part of the protestors. Which is a damn shame, because I really want there to be a movement for economic reform.

Wow guys

a government building is private property?

somebody said it was owned by an "absentee landlord". so which is it?

this is kindof a side-note, they got michael taussig to give this talk about his involvement w/ occupy wall street. it was more like poetry, it was so beautiful, a load of people from lsx showed up, the aisles were packed. its about one of the nights that the eviction was postponed.

Don't think it matters significantly re: government or private property. Anywho, if you care about your community you don't go around fucking it up cuz you like, hate the pigs, maaan.

Why not invest time in community service or forming and taking action on a realistic agenda? It's not a rad party with all your buds, it's hard, time-consuming work without personal publicity, or big glorious stories you can tell your kids one day, or any of that, but it's important to do. This makes the idealist in me weep. /rant over

I've got too much going on ATM to respond to the comments made here in the last 24 hours, but I'd just like to register that there's a lot false dichotomying (<-- yeah I'll make it a word) bullshit happening. If I still care after tomorrow I'll be responding here.

thanks for your condescension btw

I'm busy, icing a baton head wound courtesy of a pushy cop, and trying to figure out if my friend in the hospital after his tazing is going to jail tonight or tomorrow for his "disorderly conduct," so forgive me for having a low tolerance for bullshit, cop or otherwise.

geez hoos, tk care

taking action on a realistic agenda?

ohhhh fuck, u for got the quotes there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsuGvyoE21Y&feature=player_embedded

a proud moment in policing

looks like captain bong rip got a total buzz kill right there. but seriously, there's a ton of capital the NY protests brought to the movement, and Occupy Oakland stuff is just flushing it down the toilet. which is tough, it's hard to control the people/message when it's something that anyone can take up.

http://occupywallst.org/article/dc-occupier-attacked-and-hospitalized-park-service/

"capital," you're being funny on purpose now I bet.

The audio on that video clip was seriously difficult, but as near as I could make out, the police officer says that raising one's hands in the air is "disorderly conduct", and that is what precipitated the arrest. He was most likely tazed for not instantly grasping the need for complete submission, but insisting on trying to walk away. He also raised his voice. He got about three steps befor they tazed him.

I'm busy, icing a baton head wound courtesy of a pushy cop, and trying to figure out if my friend in the hospital after his tazing is going to jail tonight or tomorrow for his "disorderly conduct," so forgive me for having a low tolerance for bullshit, cop or otherwise.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i applaud your efforts and energy and courage but sometimes you use your OWS street cred as a kind of trump card. i think your experience and actions give you insight and awareness of some important stuff but it doesn't make you right by default, nor does it give you the power to just bat away sincere questions and concerns.

i'm really familiar w/ this from wisconsin btw where some arguments would reach the point where people were nearly just shouting out how long they had been at the capitol building, etc. "have you been down here in the trenches with us" has a lot of moral force but it doesn't mean you get to dismiss the rest of us.

don't think saying "I'm too busy to argue right now" is really the same as "bat away sincere questions"

Spectrum maybe you have never heard of squats before? It's a common legal principle in many countries that abandoned property can be taken over, but you seem a lot more concerned with the letter of the (U.S.) law so whatever. Squats involve a lot of hard work and I don't think most of the folks planning on that building takeover had any illusions about that.

and I guess I have to also point out here that cops deliberately create these confrontations (i.e kettling people AFTER preventing them from entering the building). Blaming the protestors for reacting is imo getting on a pretty high horse. What would you do if some cop knocked your friends' teeth out for no reason? Or if you were teargassed and arrested for riding your bike down the wrong street at the wrong time? I mean yeah it's a global stage and ideally people maintain some level of media consciousness, but shit gets heated.

that's true. i guess it's partly the combo of the confrontational images and the optics of the folks there -- mostly young folks, wearing lots of anarchist badges and masks etc, cursing and yelling things full of bravado and resentment. i can't blame any particular person for this, it's just the dynamics of the thing, but it makes it so easy to dismiss as a kind of "young folks acting out" thing. maybe i'm getting the wrong impression, but the demographics seem to have kind of "distilled" in the last few weeks/months.

http://nameigoob.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-really-happened-at-occupy-oakland.html

the idea of occupying the Kaiser Center was super-ballsy. i question whether anyone seriously thought they could do it, or if it was really just about the gesture. This is a city-owned building that the City of Oakland has gone back and forth for years now about what to do with it -- keep it and turn it into something revenue-generating or sell it? It's probably the most valuable piece of city-owned vacant real estate.

am & Spectrum reflecting the uselessness of Obamney voters

from watching youtubes when occupy shit goes down, my impression is that "young folks acting out" is always preceded by riot cops attempting to incite riots by using shock grenades, tasers, tear gas, batons, etc. i see confrontations like the one in oakland as non-violence vs violence, but that the militarism of police as a manifestation of the state's will would erode my sense that we live in a good and free society, especially when i'm just trying to march/squatting for the greater good. it seems that protests like this get so much attention one the one hand bc it seems like some third world rebellion in frickin CA, and on the other bc protestors don't seem to be asking for anything crazy, yet get the tactic of overwhelming force thrown at them.

rightwing aggregating site's description of yesterday's Washington Post article saying leave the rich alone, we just need to educate the poor and get them married: With his typically inimitable and lucid prose, James Q. Wilson appears in today’s Outlook section of the Washington Post today with a clear-eyed deconstruction of the whole inequality blather of the left: “Angry About Inequality? Don’t Blame the Rich.” Aw, what fun is that? There’s a lot packed into this relatively short article, so you should read the whole thing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/angry-about-inequality-dont-blame-the-rich/2012/01/03/gIQA9S2fTQ_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop

James Q. Wilson, a former professor at Harvard University and UCLA, is the Ronald Reagan professor of public policy at Pepperdine University

In the hours after the protester was tased, more than 15,000 people logged on to SaveOccupyDC.org to sign an online petition asking for the Park Service to allow protesters to remain camping in either park.

No further confrontation today yet?

what was the point of vandalizing City Hall, destroying 100+ year old models, etc.

(in Oakland, that is)

I have more sympathy for the dudes in DC than in Oakland, which just seems like a total mess

that wapo thing

In his book “The Poverty of the Poverty Rate,” Nicholas Eberstadt shows that over the past 30 or so years, the percentage of low-income children in the United States who are underweight has gone down

haha

Barack Obama & Leon Panetta destroying a 225-year-old Constitution, that's a total mess

didn't know Panetta and Obama had taken up residence inside a scale model of Oakland City Hall

I saw some young 'jugalos' spray-painting a wall with "jugalos for life" shit and then take photos next to it. They were just young and stupid kids; some good protesters cleaned it up later in the night.

How fucked up is your protest movement when you have to clean up after juggalos?

Occupy PsychoCircus

L

that wapo thing

_In his book “The Poverty of the Poverty Rate,” Nicholas Eberstadt shows that over the past 30 or so years, the percentage of low-income children in the United States who are underweight has gone down_

haha

omg

am & Spectrum reflecting the uselessness of Obamney voters
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Monday, January 30, 2012 6:21 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sorry dr. morns but as we've established elsewhere you are King Uselessness. your entire persona is built around supposedly devastating cynicism about everything involving contemporary politics.
so i may be useless, but you are uselessness as a principle. so pot meet kettle etc.

you may be right, every man has his reasons, etc

use "cynicism" one more time to change yr name to Nude Spock

There is no way to exclude 'the wrong element' from local Occupy protests because it all takes place in public areas. If some shithead juggalos show up, you cannot blame the non-juggalos for their being there, or for them acting like shitheads.

However, a protest movement that is going to survive this sort of thing needs to act to dissociate themselves from this sort of thing. I would recommend that local Occupy groups innoculate themselves as much as possible, by forming a policy and publicizing it, that whenever they see violent or destructive behavior, the legitimate protestors will call 911 and report it.

They should issue statements, not just condemning the violence or destruction, but insisting that police respond to it, while carefully pointing out that herding non-violent protestors into small spaces before ordering them to disperse, and gassing them, beating them or tasing people sitting quietly, is not an appropriate way to deal with violence, bcz, you know, the people they are mistreating aren't the violent ones. Both pieces of this message need to be vehemently stressed.

I deeply sympathize with hoos, bcz he is one of the ones who is busy trying to manage these messages in the face of a corporate-controlled media, while stuck between the hair-trigger riot cops on the one hand and the opportunistic thrill seeking juggalo-types on the other. And he isn't getting paid for this!

amst/morbs it'd be nice if you kept your personal beefs out of this thread

ie you're acting like a couple of juggalos